


A Hook in an Eye

by madsthenerdygirl



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Feels, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst and Humor, F/M, Garcia Flynn Dramatic Trash Bi, It's a Race! Against Time! For Treasure!, Jessica Logan is a Saint, Jiya is Also a Saint, Lucy is a Queen, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Rufus Carlin Does Not Deserve This Shit, So Many Indiana Jones References, Threesome - F/M/M, Trash ot3, Treasure Hunting, What I'm Saying is There's Angst, Wyatt Logan's Bisexuality Crisis, everyone is a disaster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-01 12:46:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 50,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14520897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madsthenerdygirl/pseuds/madsthenerdygirl
Summary: Two years ago, Dr. Lucy Preston said that you’d see her back in the field over her dead body.Then she heard those six words.“Wyatt’s gone missing. So has Flynn.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the “anti-love poem” by Margaret Atwood, “You Fit Into Me.”
> 
> You fit into me  
> like a hook into an eye
> 
> a fish hook  
> an open eye
> 
> (Read it backwards.)

**The Treasure of the Century**

_The story of a real-life Indiana Jones—and her loyal sidekicks._

_By Kate Drummond_

September 21, 2016

It should surprise no one who knows her, but the whole thing started on a dare.

When I stop by Dr. Preston’s house to see her, I’m expecting the place to be swarmed by reporters. I’m pretty surprised when it’s not—and then I learn why when a very intimidating-looking man opens the door.

I introduce myself, and his face immediately softens. “Oh, from _Time_. Yeah, c’mon in.” He pauses, thinking. “Luce’s been kind of nervous,” he confides. “Could you go easy on her?”

I say that I’ll try, and he beams at me. “I’m Wyatt, by the way, Wyatt Logan.”

We shake hands. This must be Sergeant Logan, formerly of Delta Force, now one third of the team that the press has been hailing for the last few weeks.

Logan leads me through the house into a beautiful living room with plenty of sunlight. There I meet three other people: a tall, imposing-looking man, who looks at me the same way Logan did a moment ago, a smiling blonde, and there, curled up on the sofa, the woman of the hour—Dr. Lucy Preston.

The blonde introduces herself quickly as Amy, Dr. Preston’s younger sister. “I’ll just be upstairs,” she says.

Dr. Preston’s mother, renowned historian Carol Preston, has been battling lung cancer the last year. She’s unfortunately in the final stages, as we’ve all just learned in a statement released by her two daughters just last month, right before the media storm hit.

When I ask how her mother’s doing, Dr. Preston smiles bravely. “She’s a real fighter,” she says.

Some people might see a sick mother as an excuse to stay home rather than go trotting around the globe, but Dr. Preston is adamant that her mother wanted her to pursue her career. “Mom was the one who always challenged me and pushed me,” she says. “She’d hate it if I held myself back because of her. Doing what I do is honoring her better than staying at home would.”

I’m also introduced to the third member of the team. The six-foot-four man glaring at me is Garcia Flynn, and like Logan, his prickly attitude melts away after proper introductions are made.

“We’ve had a lot of people coming here to bother Lucy,” Flynn admits. “Wyatt and I have had a hell of a time scaring them off.”

With two war veterans patrolling the house, no wonder the neighborhood was empty when I arrived. When I say this out loud, Dr. Preston laughs.

“I call them my guard dogs,” she admits, grinning. Neither Logan nor Flynn seem to object to this statement.

I’m asked if I would like some tea, and then it’s down to business. “Where would you like me to start?” Dr. Preston asks.

It’s clear who runs the show around here. Flynn and Logan both sit quietly, comfortable but waiting. All three seem very relaxed in one another’s presence. Flynn is stretched out on one end of the sofa, Logan in an armchair, and Dr. Preston curls up on the other end of the sofa. You can immediately sense the camaraderie. Both men look at Dr. Preston, and if it wasn’t clear before, I now know who’s lead we’re all following.

“Why don’t you tell us how you got started on this whole…” Words fail me for a moment.

“Treasure hunting business?” Dr. Preston asks with a quirk of her mouth.

That works, sure.

The story sketched is probably one that Dr. Preston would consider boring, but I certainly don’t think so. Raised by two academics, Dr. Preston showed her genius at an early age, memorizing facts and giving extremely in-depth reports at school. Her mother especially encouraged her work, helping her to submit her history essays for contests. She currently holds three PhDs: in history, art history, and archeology.

“I remember watching _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ with my dad when I was a kid,” she gushes, her eyes sparkling. Her father, Professor Henry Wallace, unfortunately died about five years ago. I can tell from her fond tone of voice that they were close. “That was the moment I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

She also loved art, she admits, and both men chime in for her to tell me about her journals.

Dr. Preston laughs. “I’ve got a huge stack of journals, I’m always writing and sketching.”

“Seeing Luce without a journal is a sign of the apocalypse,” Logan adds.

Her talent for art wasn’t good enough for her to pursue it as a career, but it did foster a lifelong love, and when she was studying history, adding art history onto it didn’t seem much of a stretch.

“Adding a third PhD didn’t seem like much of a stretch,” Flynn grumbles, but his tone is warm. It’s clear that both men greatly respect Dr. Preston, and despite her small stature and easygoing nature, you can sense the backbone that’s made her the undisputed leader of the expeditions this team has become famous for.

While still earning her doctorates, Dr. Preston got in touch with the Monuments Men, a group started in World War II that later gained more notoriety after the film named after them directed by George Clooney. The group’s aim is to find and return all art stolen by the Nazis in WWII. It sounded like something Indiana Jones would help out with, and Dr. Preston started a correspondence, befriending many members of the organization.

This is where we get on a bit of a tangent and all three start talking over each other. This, I later learn from Amy Preston, is a habit of theirs.

“But Flynn was already—” Dr. Preston begins, but Flynn interrupts her.

“No, let’s focus on you—”

“Hold on, doesn’t it start with the—” Logan cuts in.

It’s like watching a three-way tennis match. I give up trying to follow and just wait until they sort themselves out.

“Flynn had already been working with the group for a couple of years,” Dr. Preston explains.

“I was involved in various revolutions in Eastern Europe,” Flynn expands.

In fact, as my research showed, Garcia Flynn’s war record is actually longer than Logan’s, although Logan is the one known as the soldier of the group.

“I’m not on a lot of official records,” Flynn laughs.

Does that mean he was a spy?

“That’s classified,” he responds, winking. Logan and Dr. Preston both roll their eyes fondly.

What he can tell me is that in the process, he lost his wife and daughter in a bombing attack that took the lives of many other civilians.

“I was lost for a really long time,” he admits, his eyes going dark. “The Monuments Men reached out to me, knowing my background and hoping I could do a lot of the legwork that they couldn’t. I had connections, knew a lot about Europe, had traveled, so on. It sounded like a good distraction from my grief.”

Meanwhile, during her correspondence with the same group, Dr. Preston ended up in an argument.

“One of the members and I had a bit of a… disagreement,” Dr. Preston explains.

Flynn looks amused while Logan snorts. I have a feeling this was a little more than just a ‘disagreement’, but I let it slide.

“The gist of it was that we were disagreeing over what happened to the lost Templar Treasure that disappeared in the 13th century, and they ended up daring me to try and find it.” Dr. Preston gives a small, proud smile, a gleam in her eyes. “I never could turn down a dare.”

Determined, Dr. Preston was put in contact with Flynn to help her since he was familiar with many of the European locations of the Templars and had experience in the field. The U.S. government, however, didn’t like the idea of sending Dr. Preston into the arms of a notorious rebel rouser, and so assigned newly discharged Sergeant Logan to accompany her.

“I’d just become a professor at Stanford,” Dr. Preston adds. “They weren’t too keen on my going it alone, either.”

I ask if it was love at first sight for the three of them. Flynn laughs outright, while Logan shifts uncomfortably in his seat and Dr. Preston blushes.

“Wyatt and I had a fistfight,” Flynn explains, still grinning at the memory.

“You were an ass,” Logan shoots back.

Whatever their personal issues, however, all three managed to settle their differences—and actually succeeded.

“It took us months,” Dr. Preston explains. “Everyone wants to think that there’s just one big treasure, but the truth is that with something like this, a big group of people trying to disappear—I mean these men were fighting for their lives, they had the Catholic Church after them. It’s hard to explain today the kind of influence the church had. It was all-encompassing. Like a totalitarian regime today, like Stalin’s reign or Mao in China. Even the locals would give you up because they believed in the Church’s message. So the men split up, and so did the treasure.”

The discovery of the lost templar treasure made splashy headlines, but names were kept out of it. All three wanted privacy.

“I was still grieving and the last thing I needed was publicity,” Flynn admits.

“My wife would kill me if reporters showed up at our doorstep,” Logan says, smiling fondly.

“And I didn’t think my university would appreciate their classes getting interrupted by reporters,” Lucy adds.

The credit instead went to the Monuments Men organization as a whole, along with various countries and the Catholic Church for their ‘internal investigations and cooperation’.

“Did it suck, seeing other people get the credit for what we did?” Logan says. “Yeah, it did. Totally. But it was worth it for our privacy.”

The three had come to love working together and being out in the field, however. “We got bit by the bug,” Flynn calls it. Soon they were working together again, around Dr. Preston’s teaching schedule.

In cooperation with the Monuments Men, the three began what I consider an illustrious career. They focused mainly on artwork lost in WWII. Some of their finds include Raphael’s _Portrait of a Young Man_ , Caravaggio’s _Nativity_ , and the _Just Judges_ panel taken from the Ghent altar. They’ve found more recently missing art as well, such as the paintings taken in the Stella Gardner museum heist and Picasso’s _Le Pigeon aux petits pois_.

“I had to go diving around in a landfill for that one,” Logan notes.

“You say that like we weren’t right there with you,” Flynn points out. “I still can’t eat French food.”

I ask about other, well, treasure.

“We’re not really about gems and stuff,” Dr. Preston says quickly. A massive pink diamond was stolen a few years ago and when asked if she would help find it, she turned it down. “I’m about the history and cultural significance of a piece, not about finding rocks that have overinflated prices and might have been gotten with slave labor.”

“Don’t put a quarter in her,” Flynn warns. “She’ll talk about that all day.”

They have found what others would consider proper ‘treasure’, however. Tucker’s Cross, for example, a long-missing gold cross with emeralds in it, was one of their finds. Another was the Crown Jewels of Ireland.

“Those actually don’t include a crown,” Dr. Preston adds, apparently happy to launch into the history of it.

“And to think, the whole thing would’ve been solved years ago if Francis Shackleton hadn’t been gay,” Flynn muses.

Before I can ask what that means, Logan picks up a pillow and chucks it at Flynn’s head.

Finally, we come to the reason that I’m here today, the reason that these three are getting their own _Time Magazine_ cover shoot:

The Amber Room.

Once called “the eighth wonder of the world,” the Amber Room was a gorgeous room constructed completely out of panels of amber, decorated further with gold, silver, and jewels. It was built as a gift from Peter the Great to symbolize the peace between Russia and Prussia. During World War II, however, it was dismantled and taken by the Nazis to be reconstructed, possibly in the famous planned Fuhrermuseum of Hitler’s dreams.

The room was reconstructed in Konigsberg’s castle museum, but the curator, Alfred Rohde, was told to dismantle it yet again and ship it to safety as the Allies advanced. Shortly after, the castle was bombed, and the trail went cold.

Many believed the Amber Room to be lost, but Dr. Preston didn’t think so. “The Nazis kept meticulous records,” she says, “and were notoriously paranoid about the art that they stole. There were backup plans for backup plans.” She, along with Flynn and Logan, was determined to find the Amber Room.

And just this last month, they did—along with the fabled Nazi ‘train of gold’ hidden in a secret tunnel in the Polish mountains.

“I wouldn’t call it a train of gold,” Dr. Preston protests.

“I would,” Flynn replies.

The train not only contained crates carefully packed with the panels of the room, but stacks and stacks of lost art. The best part, according to Dr. Preston, is how well everything was preserved.

“It’s probably best that an exact copy of the Amber Room was constructed,” she says, which it was—right down to the last detail, to the tune of $11 million. “Because the original panels were weakened from so much tearing down and putting back up and tearing down.”

The current plan is to install the original panels in special display cases and have them in an adjoining room to the new Amber Room.

Of course, such a huge discovery couldn’t remain secret. “We’d held onto our anonymity last time,” Logan says, “But I think that was mostly because there’s so much mystery around the Templar treasure. And the Church was eager to take credit.”

Flynn, at this point, throws the pillow back into Logan’s face. I later learn his late wife was a devout Catholic.

Lucy rolls her eyes, but her voice is fond as she says, “the boys like to needle each other.”

Now, everyone wants a piece of the team—especially Dr. Preston, who both men are swift to say did the majority of the homework involved.

“Logan and I are but humble messenger boys,” Flynn says. “We go where Lucy tells us and we do what she tells us to do. Including the heavy lifting.”

Other than the obvious reporters, I ask, have their lives changed in any way since the massive discovery?

The three look at one another, then slowly shake their heads. “I’ve still got the bug,” Flynn says. “I want to try and find something else.”

“I’ve got a lot on my plate,” Dr. Preston admits. “Semester’s starting soon, and with my mother… it’s all a good distraction, really. Doesn’t leave time for me to think about fame.”

“My wife doesn’t treat me any differently,” says Logan.

I ask what they’re planning on trying to find next—maybe those eight missing Faberge eggs?

The three all look amused at that. “It’s kind of a long-running joke between us,” Dr. Preston explains. “About the eggs, I mean.”

Before I can ask just what the joke entails, she launches into the rest of my question. “We want to find the rest of the paintings taken in the 2010 heist that took the Picasso.”

“I keep trying to get her to go after this galleon that’s in the Mojave Desert,” Flynn adds. “Loaded with black pearls, supposedly. She keeps saying no.”

Dr. Preston shoots him a fond but stern look. “You’re welcome to go and search for it on your own if you want.”

“Whatever it is,” Logan says, “We hope it generates a little less press than this did. We like to keep a low profile. We’ve still got to live our lives, after all.”

My final question is to Dr. Preston: is this living up to what she’d dreamed about as a child?

“In some ways, no,” she replies. “In some ways, yes. But when I opened up the train door… when I stepped inside, and I saw this art looking back at me…” She smiles, open and easy, with awe in her eyes. “There’s nothing like that moment. That’s what keeps me coming back.”

As we say goodbye, all three treating me like an old friend, I’m struck by how down to earth all three of them are. Fame really hasn’t touched any of them, especially in how they treat one another. The respect and care they have for one another is obvious, and I’m told it’s how they succeed so often.

“I couldn’t do anything without my boys,” Dr. Preston tells me, while the men insist it’s all her.

“Logan helps out sometimes,” Flynn adds.

“Yeah, Flynn’s not so bad, I suppose,” Logan muses. But the soft smiles the men give each other show a different story—one of hard-won camaraderie.

I’m sure the world hasn’t seen the last of these three.

 

* * *

 

 

_Two Years Later_

_November 15 th, 2018_

Lucy clicked to the last slide of the presentation. “And that should just about cover it.” She smiled at the assembled students. “All right, as always, the slides will be up on Blackboard, and you can all text me if you have questions and are daunted by the prospect of doing it in person. I want you all to really look at the stuff we covered at the beginning, that’s what is most important to remember so it’ll be on the test.”

Her students began putting away their notebooks and laptops, some grumbling, some already thinking about the next class. A few waved at her as they exited, and a couple had questions right away.

She answered them as best she could while she packed up. Jiya was supposed to be calling her with information on the Paititi expedition…

“Dr. Preston?”

Lucy looked up, smiling at the girl. A freshman, she was pretty sure, she didn’t recognize her. “Hey, what can I do for you?”

The girl held out a magazine. “I know it’s probably stupid, but… this article with you is what made me want to get into history. I was hoping… you could maybe sign it?”

Lucy held in her sigh as she looked down at the _Time_ magazine cover. It was a photo of herself, standing on a chair and smiling. Wyatt was on her right, Flynn on her left. Even standing on the chair, she was only a bit taller than Flynn. They had their arms around each other. She remembered the photo snapping right as she was about to burst into giggles because Flynn and Wyatt were threatening to sweep their joined hands under her legs, lifting her up into the air.

They all looked unbearably happy.

The photoshoot had been two days before the reporter came to interview them. She could remember it in painful, crystal detail. Every time she thought that article was finally behind her…

She smiled, grabbing a pen and signing her name with a flourish. It wasn’t this girl’s fault that the article now had some… baggage, attached to it. No sense in ruining her day over something that was personal and nobody’s fault.

Okay, it was somebody’s fault, but neither of those people were the girl in front of her.

“You probably get asked about it a lot,” the girl said. “The Amber Room, I mean.”

“From time to time,” Lucy admitted.

“Why did you go back to teaching?” the girl asked. “You went back to Stanford full time after this article, I looked it up. But in the article itself, you say you’re planning on going somewhere.”

“My mom died,” Lucy said, the lie coming to her easily now after two years of practice. “That really changed things, put a lot into perspective. I stayed here to be close to her during the final stages, and after that—well, loss changes you.”

Loss had certainly changed her.

“Oh, of course, I’m sorry about your mom.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve had time to come to peace with it.”

“Do you think you’ll ever go out into the field again?”

Lucy felt that old wanderlust in her chest, just for a moment. A small pocket of warmth, there and gone. “I really don’t know.”

“Okay. Thanks!” The student smiled brightly at her and headed out.

Lucy sighed. She’d done her best to detach herself from the past, but… some things took longer to die.

She turned to finish packing up her things when she heard boots behind her. “If you’re here about the essay grades, make an appointment during my office hours,” she said.

“Ah, gee, professor, can’t make an exception?”

Lucy whirled around, the smile coming to her face instinctively. “Jess?”

Jessica Logan stood there, black boots, jeans, a tank top—her usual attire. She looked like she’d just come from the bar. “Hey, Lucy.”

Lucy hugged her, breathing in the familiar smell of her Gillette deodorant and the lingering scent of alcohol, the warmth of her. It was like getting hit with a freight train of memories. “Jess, holy crap, it’s been—”

“Two years.” Jess nodded. “I know.”

Something in her tone made Lucy’s stomach flop worriedly. Jess didn’t… know anything, did she? But how could she? Wyatt would never have said anything.

“You should come back to my office,” Lucy said, gathering up her stuff. Jess helpfully grabbed the rest of it. “Thanks.”

Lucy led her down the hallway, struggling to think of what to say. What do you tell your former partner’s wife—also your former best friend—about why there’d been two years of silence?

“Cushy gig you got here,” Jess observed as Lucy unlocked her office door. “You got tenure yet?”

“Almost,” Lucy replied. “The board was, uh, a little disappointed when I stopped being such a celebrity. They were hoping for more expeditions like the Amber Room.”

“If only there was more than one Nazi gold train, huh?” Jess said, setting the stuff down on a chair.

“I’m consulting on an expedition for the Lost City of Paititi,” Lucy said. “They wanted me to head it myself, but I just couldn’t leave my students…”

“Lucy.”

Lucy stopped busying herself and forced herself to look Jess in the eye. Jess swallowed, and Lucy suddenly saw fear in the other woman’s eyes.

“Jess?”

Jess took a deep breath. “Have you heard from Wyatt?”

Lucy’s breath froze in her chest. “No. No, I haven’t spoken to him, since, the interview.”

Jess nodded, folding her arms.

“Why? Everything okay?”

“I don’t know,” Jess admitted. “It’s—it’s hard to tell with him, nowadays.”

“I mean you see the guy every day, Jess.”

“No, I don’t.” Jess shook her head. “Wyatt and I got a divorce a year ago.”

Lucy had to clamp down on her jaw to keep it from dropping open. “You—what? But…”

Jess shrugged. “We weren’t what the other one needed. Hadn’t been for a while, if we were being honest with ourselves. I thought it was… time that we were honest.”

“But he was… he was so loyal to you.”

“I know.” Jess nodded. “And he would’ve kept being loyal until the end of time. So I ended it. For both our sakes.”

Lucy crossed over and opened up the drawer that contained the alcohol she wasn’t supposed to have in her office. She needed a drink. “You want something?”

“I’m—I’m good.” Jess cleared her throat. “Look, you heard from Flynn, either?”

Lucy snorted. “Flynn found himself a corner to go and die in, last I heard of him. Why?”

“Wyatt’s gone missing. So has Flynn.”

Lucy nearly dropped the bottle. “What?”

Jessica waved her hand through the air. “I got a call from Flynn a week ago. He said it was urgent, that he had to get a hold of Wyatt. I gave him Wyatt’s cell phone number. Two days later, Wyatt doesn’t show up for our lunch date.”

“You’re divorced and you have lunch dates?”

“We’re divorced, doesn’t mean I hate him,” Jessica replied. “I’m all he has.”

That stung, but Lucy knew she deserved it. She’d chosen not to bury the hatchet. She’d chosen to keep her distance from both of them.

“Next thing I know, the rumor mill’s buzzing that Flynn’s gone off the grid. Wyatt’s not answering his phone, not even texts, my emails bounce back.” Lucy could see the way Jess’s face got rigid, how it always did when she was scared and trying not to show it. “I think something bad has happened, Lucy. I don’t know what ended it, but I know it ended badly. I know that it would take something like the goddamn Ark of the Covenant to get Flynn to reach out to Wyatt. Something’s wrong.”

Lucy rolled her eyes, pouring herself a drink. “Let’s be real here, Jess. Knowing Flynn, he’s probably just stuck in customs and needs Wyatt’s help to talk some government or other out of arresting him. It’s not like they’re up against Nazis.”

 

* * *

 

“When you told me you were having a ‘little trouble’,” Wyatt yelled, ducking as Goon Number #2 began to fire, “I was thinking, I dunno, you’d pissed off the U.S. army again or something. I wasn’t expecting Nazis!”

“To be perfectly fair,” Flynn shouted, standing up to fire off a couple of rounds before ducking behind the block of stone again, “I’m not sure if they’re actually Nazis or if they’re just another equally awful organization with German roots.”

“I hate you,” Wyatt informed him. “I know I’ve said that before, but I think it bears repeating: I fucking hate you.”

“Trust me,” Flynn shot back, “if I’d known you were going to whine about it the whole time, I wouldn’t have called!”

“'I need help, Wyatt',” Wyatt said, imitating Flynn and managing to completely bungle the accent. “'There’s no one else, Wyatt'. Jesus Christ, why do I fall for it every time…”

Flynn stood up, fired a couple more shots, then ducked back down. “I was serious,” he snapped. “There isn’t anyone else, and I was hoping you’d get a bit of an ego boost out of that but I guess your rainy cloud is just too thick to penetrate, Eeyore.”

“Not a good enough reason to use the word ‘penetrate’,” Wyatt shot back, not even caring that he was quoting a film in order to dredge up some proper snark. Flynn had always made him feel off-kilter, like he was stumbling a step behind.

Unlike Lucy, who’d…

He shook away that thought, and the ones about Flynn. This was supposed to be simple: get in, help Flynn sweet talk his way past a border patrol, get out.

Then fuckin’ Nazis showed up.

Or, whatever they were. They had some German name and a cross symbol of some kind and they were white and snobby and shooting at them, so. Also pretty sure one of them had hurled a racist slur at Flynn at one point, which Wyatt had been happy to reward him for with a bullet to the sternum.

“We have to get out of here,” Wyatt told him. “They’ve got more men and more ammunition.”

“If you can think of a way to get us through when they have us pinned down, be my guest,” Flynn replied.

“Y’know for someone who called for help you’re not being very grateful.”

“I’ll be grateful when your stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb behavior doesn’t pick up a tail that leads to a firefight in a thousand-year-old temple, do you have any idea what murals they’re currently destroying?”

“You sound like Lucy.”

The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Flynn froze—just for a moment but it was enough—a muscle in his jaw ticking.

“Guess all that nerd talk rubbed off on me,” Flynn said at last. His gaze seemed to bore into Wyatt, like he was… what, challenging him? Dissecting him?

Wyatt was the one who looked away. He always had been.

He breathed carefully. He was just going to help Flynn get out of this damn place alive, and then he was hopping a plane back home and never had to see the asshole again.

“Okay,” he said. “There’s two in the northwest corner, one in front, another three at least coming up behind, right?”

Flynn stood up, fired, ducked back down. “Yup.”

“Right. This is a temple, yeah? That means there has to be more than one entrance. One for the common people and one for the priests.”

Flynn’s eyes scanned the room. “This was the room where people would come to pray to God and He would speak to them.”

“But the God speaking to them was really a priest, and of course the entrance would be concealed…”

Flynn pointed at a section of the wall behind them, depicting some religious sacrifice or something. Whatever it was, the poor goat painted on there wasn’t having a good time of it. “That one. Look at the scraping on the floor.”

Wyatt inhaled. They had a way out.

He hated how in sync they still were, after two years.

“Okay. I’ll provide cover, you get to the door and figure out how it opens.”

“Probably a pressure panel—”

“I don’t want the explanation, Indiana, I want results. On three.”

Flynn smirked. “You saying I’m like Harrison Ford?”

Wyatt didn’t rise to the bait. “One, two, three.”

He stood up, firing, drawing the attention of that redhead and the men with her. He felt the rush of air as Flynn sprinted for the section of the wall he’d pointed to.

“Wyatt!”

Wyatt moved backwards, not looking behind him, trusting—as he’d always trusted, damn it—that Flynn would have his back.

Flynn grabbed him by the back of his jacket and yanked him in, the panel of rock sliding closed behind them. They were encased in darkness.

“Now what do we do?” Flynn asked.

Wyatt ignored the darkness, ignored how close they were standing, ignored his own stupid frantic heartbeat. Checked how much ammo he had left. Looked up. “We get the fuck out of here, and then you explain what the fuck’s going on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The alternate title for this, by the way, was ‘Maybe the Real Treasure was the Threesomes We Had Along the Way’ courtesy of captainofthefallen.


	2. Chapter 2

_Present Day_

 

They were sitting at Lucy’s desk now, swapping the bottle back and forth. Just like old times, almost, when Wyatt would be out at the shooting range with Flynn so they could practice i.e. be as competitive as humanly possible, and she and Jess would hang back at Jess’s bar and chat for hours.

“So what happened?” Lucy asked.

They were waiting for Jiya to call. Until then, there was nothing to do but sit awkwardly, drink, and try to talk about what had happened in the two years where they hadn’t been speaking.

Jess cleared her throat. “I might ask you the same thing.”

Lucy shrugged.

Jess gave her a patented _I’m Not Buying Your Bullshit_ look. Nobody gave those like Jessica Logan. “Lucy. You three go from being inseparable to not even speaking in the span of, what, a day?”

“Wyatt didn’t tell you.”

“Wyatt didn’t tell me shit, which is part of why we filed for divorce.” Jess sighed, suddenly looking exhausted. “Look. I know that you and Flynn thought that we were this epic love story. High school sweethearts. Devoted. But c’mon, Lucy, the guy went straight from high school to the military and then from the military to running all over the world with you. Three quarters of the time he wasn’t home. What kind of marriage is that?

“We grew into two different people. He just didn’t want to admit it. He wanted it to be like it was back in high school. When we didn’t have to be adults, we could just…” Jess shrugged. “I was his safe space. I get that. And I let him treat me like that, which is my fault. I didn’t want to hurt him and it wasn’t like I was eyeing anyone else. I cared about him, I still do, but…” She shook her head. “We just didn’t fit anymore. Sometimes that’s how it goes. No big betrayal, no catalyst. You just look at one another and realize… you’ve grown apart. You’re not a ‘we’ anymore.”

Lucy felt that distinct lump in her throat again. The one she’d felt all the time, when around Wyatt. When around Flynn, too, but not quite as much.

Guilt.

“There was a catalyst with all of you, though,” Jess noted. She turned her piercing eyes to Lucy. “Wyatt wouldn’t say, but he was a wreck for days. Next thing I heard, you’re back here and Flynn’s flying solo, finding a goddamn ship in the middle of the desert of all things.”

The lump got bigger, made it harder to breathe. Lucy had to look away.

Jess leaned in, her voice going quiet and raspy. “C’mon, Lucy. It’s okay. Whatever it is…”

Lucy stood up, walked across the room. Stared out her office window even though it was dark now. “It was a long time coming. We were three very different people. It was only a matter of time until we had an argument we couldn’t patch up.”

Even with her back turned to her, she could feel Jess’s gaze on her. “That’s all,” Jess said, her tone saying just how much of that bullshit she believed.

“That’s all, Jess.”

 

* * *

 

_September 22 nd, 2016_

 

“That’s all,” she told Amy, the morning after.

Amy was eyeing the bottles of beer in the recycling bin. “Uh-huh. So you pouring Wyatt into a cab this morning and Flynn just, what, vanishing into thin air? That’s all the result of an argument over a stupid ship?”

“Pearl galleon,” Lucy corrected automatically. “It’s in the sand hills west of El Centro, California. Supposedly. Juan de Iturbe went on a pearl-diving expedition in 1615, came back with a ship filled with black pearls. He sailed up the Gulf of California, a storm swept the ship all the way to Lake Cahuilla, which was already drying up. The ship was stranded, he beached it, and there have been legends about it ever since.”

“And this ship made Flynn ghost you and got Wyatt so drunk he’s still sunk in it the next morning.”

“He was just hungover.”

“That was not hungover, that was _still drunk_ , Lucy.” Amy put her hands on her hips. “I’m not stupid. Something went down and it was not an argument over some treasure.”

“You don’t have to believe me,” Lucy replied, finishing washing the dishes from last night. They hadn’t bothered cleaning them up after dinner. Other things had sort of… distracted her. “It’s the truth.”

Amy was silent for a long moment. Then, proving once again that she was the better person, she dropped it. “So are you going back out into the field with anyone else?”

Lucy snorted. “You’ll see me back in the field over my dead body.”

 

* * *

 

_Present Day_

 

Her computer rang, jolting her back into the present.

Jiya.

Lucy walked back over to her desk, clicking on the Answer button to start the video call. “Hey, Jiya, thanks for this.”

“No problem, this is fascinating.” Jiya paused when she saw that Lucy wasn’t alone. “Hey, who’s this?”

“This is Jessica,” Lucy said. “She’s an old friend.”

“Call me Jess,” Jess added.

“Heya, I’m Jiya. Hacker extraordinaire.” Jiya saluted. “Something tells me you want a little more than just the most recent Paititi updates.”

Lucy sighed, sitting down. “You’re right. Listen, Jiya, Jess’s hu… uh, a mutual friend of ours has gone missing. We need to see if you can track him.”

“Um, depends, is this guy associated with any government agency?”

“Not at the moment,” Jess said.

“No CIA, FBI, nothing like that?”

“Nope.”

Jiya typed a bit on her other computer. She had about three or four set up on her massive desk. Lucy had seen it only once in person, but it had been a doozy. “Okay… I’ll need his phone number, name, any other information you can give me. Passport. Social security. The usual.”

Jess rattled those off. Lucy kept silent. She could rattle most of them off, too, although not Wyatt’s number. He’d dumped his old phone number after the whole thing. As if Lucy or Flynn would have called him in the first place.

Didn’t mean she’d forgotten.

“He’s with someone else,” Jess added at the end. “A Garcia Flynn.” She looked at Lucy expectantly.

Lucy wanted to say _what makes you think I know anything_ , but Jess’s eyes were warm and kind and really, what was the point in lying when the lives of her boys were at stake?

Not that they were her boys. Not anymore. If they ever had been in the first place.

She gave Jiya the information on Flynn that she remembered. After so many months crisscrossing borders, talking to government and academic agencies, dealing with red tape, getting into it with law enforcement, it was inevitable that they learned the legal shit about each other.

Especially when ‘getting into it with law enforcement’ was practically a requirement for a trip that included Wyatt Logan and Garcia Flynn.

Jiya typed away the entire time, nodding along to show that she was listening. “Okay. This might take me a few minutes. What was their last known location?”

Lucy looked at Jess. “Uh… the Middle East?” Jess hazarded. “I think?”

“The Middle East?” Lucy’s stomach twisted. What the hell was Flynn doing, heading straight into one of the most war-torn and contested areas in the world? And then dragging Wyatt into it?

Made sense why he’d need Wyatt, though. Wyatt had served several tours of duty over there. He knew the region better than pretty much anyone else Flynn could’ve gotten a hold of.

For the first time, real fear started to seize her.

What were they up to?

 

* * *

 

  _June 4 th, 2013_

 

“And this is Wyatt Logan,” Denise Christopher said. “Formerly of Delta Force.”

Denise Christopher was the head of the board at Stanford, but Lucy was pretty sure she was the general of the entire goddamn army in another life or something. The woman had that special brand of Tough but Fair Mom vibe that terrified and endeared her simultaneously to everyone around her.

“Ma’am,” Logan said, sticking his hand out.

“Pretty sure we’re the same age,” Lucy replied, but she shook his hand anyway. “So don’t call me ‘ma’am’.”

Meeting Wyatt Logan hadn’t been auspicious, to say the least. He was cute, sure, and, okay, he could get a laugh out of her, and maybe his earnest way of insisting on being her protection was kind of sweet. But he was also a little cocky, thought country music was the best thing since sliced bread, and didn’t know the first thing about art or history unless it had to do with cars.

Great.

Meeting Garcia Flynn, however, had gone even worse.

He’d held his hand out to Lucy, smiling as they shook hands. “You must be Dr. Lucy Preston. I’ve read a lot about you when the society asked me to help be your guide. I have to admit your essay on reexamining ancient Egypt from a post-feminist perspective was fascinating.”

Lucy had found herself blushing. She hadn’t expected Flynn to care all that much about her, never mind care enough to actually read her academic texts. He had to go looking for those on JStor or something, they weren’t exactly published in the National Geographic or anything (much to her mother’s endless dismay).

While Flynn had been unexpected warmth towards her, however, towards Logan… well…

It was the society’s idea to pair her up with Flynn. It had been the idea of the U.S. government to pair them both with Logan.

Neither Flynn nor Logan were all too keen to work with the other one.

Really, somebody in this entire mess should’ve realized that pairing a man who’d fought for the rebels in nine wars with the man who’d fought for the world’s biggest military in about four tours was really, really not a good idea.

Unfortunately, nobody had. So the first thing Garcia Flynn had said to Wyatt Logan was,

“Oh, I see you’re a part of the FUBAR squad.”

And the first thing Wyatt Logan said to Garcia Flynn was,

“And I see you’re a part of the terrorist squad.”

It went downhill from there.

When they’d told the reporter that there’d been a fistfight, they hadn’t been exaggerating. Lucy’d had to jump out of the way at first. Flynn had been being an asshole, but he hadn’t been the one to throw the first punch—that had been Wyatt. As she’d later learned, Wyatt was the one with the short fuse. Flynn’s temper was far reaching and terrifying, but it took a lot to stir it up. The problem was getting it to die down once it was ignited.

“Hey!” Lucy shouted, stepping into the middle—unfortunately not before Wyatt had landed a punch that gave Flynn a black eye and Flynn had hit Wyatt in the solar plexus, sending him into a coughing fit.

“I was under the impression that the two of you were professionals,” she snapped. “Now start acting like it.”

“I’m perfectly happy to act under your orders,” Flynn replied. “So long as that hypocrite—”

“Well my orders are to get along with him,” Lucy said.

“Seriously?” Wyatt wheezed. “We are not working with this psycho.”

“This ‘psycho’ has the information we need on Eastern Europe, so Sergeant, kindly shut the fuck up.” Lucy folded her arms and glared at Flynn. “You two. I don’t want a word out of either of you that isn’t ‘yes Lucy’ or ‘no Lucy’. Understood?”

Both men nodded.

She hadn’t known it then, of course, but she probably should have, seeing the way Wyatt had gone a bit slack-jawed and Flynn had gotten this gleam in his eye as they stared at her.

She should’ve known it was all going to end in flames.

 

* * *

 

_Present Day_

 

“Okay,” Jiya said, “I think I’ve got something. They’re in Israel.”

“Israel?”

Jess let out a sigh of relief. “Well thank God, right?”

“Thank God?” Lucy felt a little hysterical. “Do you have any idea all the shit that’s going on with the Israeli military right now? The country’s picking a fight with everyone they can, there’s talk of nuclear weapons being stolen, there was just a strike on Syria—that area could go nuclear, literally or figuratively, at any moment. And they’re right in the middle of it!”

“Could be worse,” Jiya mentioned. “Could be an active warzone.”

Lucy thought she might throw up. Just that morning she’d read an article that said if the thing with Israel blew up, it could lead to the worst war the Middle East had ever seen.

And both Wyatt and Flynn were smack dab in the middle of it.

An American, a former soldier… Wyatt might as well have a target on his back if things got ugly. Flynn might be able to skate by. He spoke seven languages, he could pass himself off as being from pretty much anywhere. But who knew what underground contacts he might have that would prefer it if he wasn’t around anymore? God knew he’d pissed off a lot of governments over the years.

No, neither of them was truly safe.

Lucy stood up. “I have to get out there.”

“Wait, what?” Jiya looked alarmed. “Lucy, I know I said it’s not an active warzone but c’mon.”

“Your students,” Jess said. “You can’t leave your job here, Lucy, I’ll go.” She stood up. “He’s my ex-husband.”

“No offense, Jess, because I’m sure you know Wyatt best, but I know him pretty well and I definitely know Flynn better than you do,” Lucy replied. “And you’ve never been out of the country. I’m better equipped to handle this.”

“I’ll work on getting Flynn’s phone number,” Jiya said. “Looks like Wyatt’s dumped his.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Jess said quickly.

“He would if he thought someone bad was using it to track him,” Lucy replied. Fuck, shit fuck shit _fuck_ , what the fuck had Flynn gotten them all into? “Okay. Just… Jiya, try and get a hold of Flynn’s number. Jess, come with me.”

“Where are we going?” Jess asked.

“Wait, hold on, do I just stay on the line?” Jiya asked.

“Yes.” Lucy looked at Jess. “If I’m going to just up and leave right before finals then I need approval from the board and I need funding. And I have a feeling that whatever Flynn was up to out there, he didn’t go out there alone. He had a backer, someone who funded his expedition.”

Jess sighed, rolling her eyes. “Of course. Mason.”


	3. Chapter 3

_Present Day_

 

They emerged from the tight, dark tunnel into the blinding sun of the desert. Wyatt shielded his eyes, taking in a great lungful of air and grateful to be out of that damn space, with Flynn brushing up against him, making Wyatt remember things he’d been trying so hard to forget and keep hidden.

“Well, that could’ve gone worse,” Flynn noted as they hurried over to the car they’d had to abandon.

Wyatt checked to make sure nobody had let the air out of the tires or shot the gas tank or anything. “Could’ve gone a hell of a lot better, too.”

“And whose fault is that? I told you, you stick out like a sore thumb.” Flynn was doing something with some of the other cars parked around.

“Says the man who can’t speak Farsi or modern Hebrew,” Wyatt snapped. Flynn had learned from Lucy how to read ancient Hebrew. He remembered the two of them, their dark heads bent together over a text, legs brushing as they sat close together on the couch.

He shoved that thought away. He’d been getting good at that, getting rid of unwanted thoughts. At least until now. He supposed he was only good at it so long as they weren’t right in front of him, in the flesh.

Flynn climbed into the driver’s seat before Wyatt could. Wyatt settled for glaring at him as he got into the passenger seat.

“So. You want to tell me what the hell you’re actually doing in Israel? You know this place is going to blow any minute. People are saying it’s inevitable.”

“People are always saying that around here,” Flynn pointed out.

Wyatt often forgot that Flynn hadn’t just been in wars—that he’d been in Iran, Iraq, the same places as Wyatt had. Just not as frequently. “You can tell the difference. This isn’t safe.”

“None of what we do ever is.”

“What you do,” Wyatt pointed out as Flynn started the car and tore out into the desert. He braced himself. He’d forgotten how reckless a driver Flynn could be. “I don’t do that anymore, remember?”

“Ah, yes, I forgot,” Flynn said, like he wasn’t the one who’d fucking abandoned them. Like Wyatt was somehow the one who’d up and fucking vanished.

Right now was really, really not the time to be starting a fight. “What the hell are you looking for, anyway?”

“The locations listed in the Copper Scroll,” Flynn told him.

Behind them came the sound of gunshots. Great, the bad guys had followed them outside. Wyatt turned and looked behind them. Did these people never give up?

“What the hell is that?” he asked. Copper Scroll? What was this, Dungeons & Dragons?

“It’s a treasure scroll found among the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Flynn explained. “It lists the locations of multiple treasures hidden around Israel.”

“Yeah, sure it does,” Wyatt replied. He was watching the bad guys get into their cars—and the cars not start. “…what did you do to their cars?”

Flynn winked at him, because Flynn was a bastard who’d never gotten the memo that you don’t just _wink_ at people. “And the treasure does exist, Wyatt. Call up Lucy, she’ll confirm it for you.”

Wyatt had never been good at controlling his facial expressions. Flynn glanced over at him for a split second and knew something was up. “What? What is it?”

Wyatt sighed. “I’m not dragging Lucy into this.”

“Why not, it’s right up her alley, you can just give her a call,” Flynn challenged.

“Not after two years of not speaking to her, I can’t,” Wyatt snapped before he could stop himself.

Flynn looked like he was considering slamming the brakes. But just because the other guys’ cars had been temporarily disabled didn’t mean they weren’t still in pursuit. “What do you mean you haven’t—why—you two haven’t spoken?”

“No.”

“What about Jessica?” Flynn asked. “She and Lucy were close, shouldn’t—”

“I haven’t seen much of Jess either the past year.” Wyatt tried to ignore the guilt in his stomach. Jess had been nothing but good to him. Patient. Loving. But when she’d said… well. She had to know, didn’t she?

Flynn glanced at him again, then let out a low whistle. “You didn’t.”

“Coming up on a year of divorce now,” Wyatt said.

“And you and Lucy didn’t…”

“Didn’t what?” Wyatt demanded. As if Lucy would go for him. As if Flynn hadn’t won that battle.

Flynn shook his head. “Nothing.”

“You’re damn right nothing.”

Silence fell for a moment. Wyatt couldn’t stand it. Once the silence between them had been comfortable. Natural. Now it strangled him.

“Why was that temple so easy to get into anyway?” he asked.

“What?”

“The temple. You said it was important or something. And not a single booby trap.”

Flynn snorted. “Leaving traps for interlopers in a temple is like flavored condoms: a great idea in theory, but so wearily often the execution is just weak and leaves a terrible taste in your mouth.”

Wyatt couldn’t help it—he laughed, even while rolling his eyes. Flynn was always making ridiculous, stupid innuendos like that.

He glanced over at Flynn, who was giving him a… a look. A look he hadn’t seen on Flynn’s face in years, one that he’d never been able to decipher.

It was the look that had always scared him.

Before he could say anything, Flynn turned and faced forward again. “Buckle up. This road’s deceptively dangerous.”

 

* * *

 

_October 4 th, 2015_

 

It was just a normal day.

People always acted like it was supposed to be this huge fucking gesture. That was how it was in movies. The girl walked down the stairs in the gorgeous gown. The boy showed up at your doorstep in the rain. Something _big_ , dammit.

But no.

No, he had to realize that he wanted to fuck Wyatt Logan while they were at a goddamn shooting range like every other Sunday afternoon.

They tended to go out there in between traveling. Wyatt had moved up from San Diego to San Francisco. It gave Jess the chance to finally open up her own bar, be the owner instead of just the waitress. Flynn had nowhere else to go. Now they could all stay close while Lucy took care of her classes during the semester.

But neither Flynn nor Wyatt liked the idea of ‘going soft’ while they hung around planning the next job. Hence the shooting range every weekend.

And all right, so maybe Lucy had a point and they got a little competitive.

Not like a little competition ever hurt anybody.

“Your stance is still shit,” Flynn noted as Wyatt picked up his gun and aimed.

“You’re still reckless about kickback,” Wyatt shot back.

Flynn rolled his eyes. He didn’t understand why Wyatt had to respond to Flynn with such aggression. Yes, all right. Flynn poked at him. And Wyatt was getting better about teasing him back. But sometimes Wyatt would shoot back at him with this edge of anger, this… overreaction. Flynn didn’t know what to make of it.

He had his suspicions, of course. He wasn’t blind. He saw the way that Lucy and Wyatt would look at each other.

It always made something in his stomach plummet.

Wyatt took up his stance and started firing. Flynn rolled his eyes. Wyatt’s firing was like everything else about him: obvious in its need for constant control.

For someone who was always trying to be in control of themselves, Flynn had never seen someone so bad at it. Wyatt was an open, illustrated children’s novel when it came to his emotions. He made reckless decisions and waited until the last minute. Without someone giving him orders he was a loose cannon who was so desperately banging at the rules and regulations as though daring someone—hoping someone would—put him in line.

It made him want to mess Wyatt up. Made him want to throw Wyatt off-kilter, watch him stumble, watch and see what Wyatt did when he was actually thrown a legitimate curveball. It was why he pulled Wyatt’s pigtails all the time.

Wyatt finished firing and set the gun down, turning and grinning at Flynn, a challenge. “What, haven’t even started?”

“Maybe I was admiring the view,” Flynn replied.

And it was a joke—he’d always made those jokes with Wyatt. Always flirted with him a little. It made Wyatt glare like nothing else and it was fantastic.

But when he said it that time…

He really didn’t know, what made all the puzzle pieces fall into place. What made the tumblers click and opened the locked room he didn’t even know existed in his mind.

But as he looked at Wyatt just then, and said it, he realized—

It was a view to admire.

And he did really want to mess Wyatt up.

He wanted to back Wyatt against the nearest wall and kiss him until Wyatt came in his goddamn pants. He wanted to feel Wyatt snarl into his mouth, buck up against him, until finally he gave in and went pliant and let Flynn touch him all over. He wanted this odd little dance of intense trust and camaraderie mixed with casual aggression to transfer over into other things, into hands grabbing and yanking, into fucking with their clothes still mostly on and seeing what Wyatt’s face looked like when someone had a hand on his dick.

It felt kind of like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his chest.

“You mean the view of all those headshots I hit?” Wyatt replied. “See if you can beat that.”

Flynn had so many things he could say to that.

But Wyatt would never.

Wyatt was straight, for one thing. Sometimes Flynn had caught what he thought was a hint of bisexuality, a stray glance, an oddly phrased sentence, but it was never enough for him to latch onto and anyway, Wyatt would probably bolt if someone suggested it. Good old Texan boy from a broken home, enrolled in the army, with a loving wife? Yeah. Some skeletons refused to come out of the closet. No pun intended.

Furthermore, Wyatt was married. Flynn would not, did not, help people cheat. And Jess was a goddamn saint. He honestly loved Jess, she was way more patient than Wyatt deserved, and she made a mean cocktail and snarked right back at Flynn when he hassled her. Aside from the principle of the matter, he would never help Wyatt hurt Jess.

Then there was Lucy.

Lucy.

How could anybody, least of all Wyatt, look at anyone else when Lucy was in the room? Lucy, the light of their goddamn lives?

Lucy, who Flynn had been in love with since he couldn’t even remember. Since finding the last of the Templar treasure in Istanbul? Since their first meeting? Since before he’d even met her, reading her history articles, marveling at her brilliance and the dry wit she snuck in?

It was just a normal day when he realized he wanted to sleep with Wyatt Logan.

But after that… nothing was normal. Not ever again.

* * *

 

_Present Day_

“So what is this Copper Scroll?” Wyatt asked.

Flynn rolled his eyes. “I swear you never paid attention while Lucy and I were talking.”

“Nope,” Wyatt said, no shame whatsoever.

Flynn smothered the smile that threatened to break out over his face. Wyatt had always napped during those talks or read a spy caper or mystery novel (his favorite was Ian Fleming followed by Agatha Christie and wasn’t that stupidly endearing), or basically ignored whatever academic history talk was going on around him. Flynn had quickly found himself fascinated by history. Wyatt had remained stubborn in caring only about protecting Lucy—and Flynn—from other treasure hunters, cranky border patrol guards, and ancient booby traps.

Of which there were not many. Crumbling infrastructure was usually the most dangerous part of entering an old temple or castle.

Flynn sighed. “All right, so the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by Bedouins, but this scroll was discovered later on in 1952 by an archeologist. It was done in copper, and people at first thought it was folklore. But after more studying they realized that it was apparently genuine and more than that—it listed 63 locations of treasure.”

“Treasure.” Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Fuck’s sake, Flynn, what is this? Does it say where the Ark of the Covenant is, too?”

“No, but it does say where those missing Faberge eggs are,” Flynn snarked back.

It was old habit—an old joke—and to his endless surprise, Wyatt laughed. He looked stricken immediately after, though, and the look squeezed at Flynn’s heart.

“So, uh, the treasure,” Flynn added hastily, feeling wrong-footed for one of the very few times in his life. “Is listed in these different locations. It’s mostly gold and silver but also things like priestly vestments.”

“Important religious relics,” Wyatt clarified.

Flynn nodded. “The problem is that the locations were listed by someone who had intimate knowledge of the area and buildings and was writing as if whoever was reading it had an intimate knowledge as well. So nobody has been able to completely identify where the treasure’s hidden.

“A lot of people assume it’s the treasure lost in the Second Jewish Temple. But a lot of others think that it’s a hoax.”

“Let me guess,” Wyatt said. “You don’t think it’s a hoax.”

“A bunch of angry Germans shooting at us tells me it’s definitely not a hoax,” Flynn pointed out.

“Or, you’ve all been duped,” Wyatt said.

“Mason thinks it’s good enough to fund,” Flynn replied.

Wyatt groaned. “Holy fuck, Mason? Really? Mason claimed he could build a time machine, Flynn, you really think him backing you is a sign of the treasure actually existing?”

“All right, let’s look at it this way,” Flynn said. “Whether this treasure is real or not, we’ve got people shooting at us—”

“No, _you’ve_ got people shooting at _you_.”

“You’re here with me now, and I definitely saw them aiming at you too. So they’re shooting at _us_.”

Wyatt threw his hands in the air as if to say ‘fuck it’.

“So, let’s forget the damn treasure,” Flynn went on, “And figure out who these fuckers are and why they want our hides.”

“Your hide.”

Flynn grinned at him, feeling the hot desert wind, taking in Wyatt’s grumpy, stubborn face. If only Lucy were there, it would be just like old times. “Admit it, Wyatt. You’ve missed this.”

“I have not,” Wyatt replied, but the small smile at the corners of his mouth said otherwise.

 

* * *

 

Lucy liked to think, once upon a time when she listened to every word out of her mother’s mouth, that she was a polite and thoughtful person.

Then she’d nearly been passed over for tenure, had gotten walked all over, and had realized (with Amy’s help) that her mother could be a right bully when she wanted to.

Now Lucy liked to think of herself as the kind of person who asked for forgiveness rather than permission.

Which was why she literally kicked Mason’s office door open.

“Bloody—” Mason jumped to his feet, eyes wide and startled. “Lucy, what the buggering fuck?”

“Where is Flynn,” Lucy demanded. “What the hell kind of assignment did you send him on, Mason?”

“If you’re suggesting that I in any way influenced Flynn—”

“I’m suggesting,” Lucy said, her voice sounding oddly cold and calm even to her own ears, “that you were more than happy to fund my expeditions when I was in charge because you got a healthy dose of the profits and got to look like a philanthropist, and that you’d be more than willing to take advantage of Flynn’s treasure lust to use him.”

“Treasure lust?” Jiya said from the computer in Jess’s hand because Jess was a saint and was carrying the laptop around the entire damn Stanford campus.

“I think that’s a little unfair,” Jess said.

Lucy felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up in her chest. Goddammit, she hated that she still cared. She hated that she was still so scared for the boys, after all these years and after the way they’d all ended things. After the way she’d been goddamn abandoned. “Flynn is a fucking psychopath, Jess. The only thing he cares about—the only thing he has ever cared about, is treasure. In getting rich. Okay?”

Jess, to her credit, didn’t even bother to look shocked. She just raised an eyebrow, and then turned to face Mason. “Did you fund an expedition that would take Flynn into the Middle East?”

“Oh, yes.” Mason grinned. “For the Copper Scroll.”

Lucy almost stopped breathing. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Nope. Flynn made a very compelling case.”

Lucy threw her hands into the air. “You gave him money to go to _Israel_ to find a treasure that half the world’s historians think is a hoax!?”

“What exactly is this scroll?” Jess asked.

“Lost treasure supposedly taken from the Jewish Temple at some point,” Jiya said over the computer. “Some say from the first temple, some say the second… some people even say Ark of the Covenant.” There was the sound of typing. “Others say the loot was taken by the Romans, others say it never existed or was dug up long ago and used to rebuild Jerusalem.”

“The Amber Room was supposedly lost,” Mason pointed out. “As was the Templar treasure. As was, oh, just about everything else you lot found. You dug a Picasso out of a goddamn landfill, Lucy. Forgive me for being optimistic.”

“Yes, but all of those treasures actually existed!” Lucy protested. “This might not even be real!”

“It was real enough for Flynn,” Mason said. “He studied the scroll and came up with a map of the locations based on the descriptions in it. You forget he became quite the historian himself in his time with you.”

Lucy folded her arms. Yes, it was true, Flynn started to pick up quite a bit about history. She could still remember his head bent close to hers, his eyes tracking her fingers over the page as she showed him how to read ancient Hebrew and Arabic. She could so easily recall how his eyes had felt on her, his gaze, warm and safe and…

She shut down those thoughts.

Flynn had made it quite clear where he stood.

“This is a little crazy even for Flynn,” she said. “You encouraged him, you put him up to this.”

“Funny how you’re so willing to cast me as the bad guy when you’re no longer taking my money,” Mason replied calmly.

“Uh, guys?” Jiya said. “I hate to interrupt, but uh. I got a hold of Flynn’s phone. You want to call it?”

 

* * *

 

_September 19 th, 2016_

Lucy couldn’t sleep.

She crept downstairs, the house dark and quiet. Wyatt was asleep in the guest room. Flynn was in Amy’s room. Amy was with Mom in the master bedroom, ready in case Mom woke up with another awful coughing fit. Lucy had offered to swap with her, but Amy had insisted.

“She’s controlled enough of your life, Lucy. I’m happy to take care of her.”

The _Time_ interview was in two days. They’d just done the photoshoot for the cover.

After years of struggling to get her papers published, years of getting passed over for tenure, she was finally getting recognition.

And it terrified her.

She was just a historian’s daughter who watched _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ a few too many times as a kid. How was she supposed to handle this? Already other reporters had been hounding her. People asked for her photograph. Sure, she wasn’t Meryl Streep or anything but it was a lot more attention than she’d ever bargained for.

It made it feel like she couldn’t draw a full breath.

To make it all worse, it was getting harder to ignore the spark inside of her every time she looked at—

“You know vodka isn’t going to make your problems go away, right?”

Lucy jumped. Spun around. Glared at Flynn. “You know, lurking in someone’s kitchen isn’t considered a polite way to thank your host.”

“You think I can’t tell when you’re panicking?” Flynn asked. He walked towards her and gently but firmly closed the door to the alcohol cupboard. “There are better ways to handle your nerves, you know.”

He was staring down at her with that look in his eyes. The one that she’d come to count on but had refused to name. The one that made her feel hot all over. The one that made her feel… seen, properly seen.

She wouldn’t give it any other name than that. It was too dangerous to call it anything else.

“Lucy,” Flynn said, all soft, looking at her with those big dark eyes, doing that thing where he hunched over to try and make himself smaller, less threatening.

“Garcia,” she replied, her voice just as soft. “How long have we known each other?”

That question—or maybe it was the use of his first name—took him by surprise. “A little over three years, I think.”

Lucy nodded. Three years. And unlike Wyatt, Flynn didn’t have the excuse of a marriage to hide behind.

She got up on her tiptoes, using the counter to brace herself. “Then how much longer are you going to make me wait?”

She could feel how tense he was, how he was just barely holding himself back. From the moment they had met, Flynn had followed her orders. It seemed now that he was waiting for another one.

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

The words were barely out of her mouth when Flynn surged forward, kissing her. His hands cupped her face softly, impossibly softly, as if the very act of kissing was going to break him, shatter him into pieces.

Lucy pushed up into him, kissing harder, encouraging him—letting him feel that it was okay to get a little rougher with her. She clung to his shirt, pressing up into him, opening her mouth to him.

Flynn made a broken noise and slid his hands down, picking her up. Lucy gave a startled squeak, wrapping her legs around him instinctively, burying her hands in his hair.

“Take me to bed,” she told him.

“Lucy—” Flynn pulled back. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. She took his face in her hands. “I think it’s time we stopped holding ourselves back.”

He looked up at her with this… this expression that it pained her to think of, years later.

It looked so much like adoration.

He carried her upstairs, and she’d had to muffle her giggles in his shoulder. “You’re ridiculous,” she told him. “I’m perfectly capable of walking by myself.”

“But that wouldn’t be nearly so fun,” Flynn replied, his voice low and right in her ear.

She thought she heard a noise as Flynn pressed her up against the wall to kiss her, but then she was lost in the heat of his mouth and the feel of his tongue as he dragged it along the roof of her mouth.

They managed to get into her room without creating too much racket. Lucy was not about to have sex in her sister’s room, even if her sister wasn’t currently staying in it.

Flynn kissed every inch of her that he undressed, soft and insistent, like he had to get his mouth on every inch of her. Like he was worshipping her. Lucy hadn’t had any too specific plans in mind when she’d said she wanted this but when he sat her down on the bed and started to kiss down her body… well, she wasn’t going to object, not at all.

She arched her spine as he spread her legs and licked into her, dragging his tongue through her, tasting her like he was starving for it. That was what had hurt later—that he’d managed to act the whole time like she was giving him something precious, like she was giving him everything he’d ever wanted. She’d felt worshipped in those moments.

It hurt, later, to know it was all a lie. Or maybe a fantasy conjured up by her stupid, reckless, naïve imagination.

She covered her mouth as a yelp threatened to work its way out. Her legs were shaking and her hips were arching helplessly. She kept whispering his name because of the way it made him groan against her skin, the vibrations adding to the relentless, awful-amazing pressure of his tongue and mouth.

She screamed into her hand as she came, shuddering, watching as he pulled back and wiped off his mouth. She’d have expected a cat that ate the canary look from him, but instead his eyes had been shining. Like she’d been the one to do something for him instead of the other way around.

He crawled back up her body, let her all but shove his clothes off and run her hands all over him, exploring him. He made the most wonderful strangled noises in the back of his throat as she kissed him, wrapped her hand around him and tugged a few times, experimenting, feeling him out.

He entered her carefully, so carefully—and she almost didn’t understand how someone who gave off such an air of recklessness, such a ‘fuck you’ attitude to the world, could be so gentle and hesitant with her. Like she was going to break on him or something.

She hooked her leg around him, tilting her hips, taking him in as far as she could. It had been so long. Three years. Now he was moving inside of her like he’d always belonged there and oh, it was only half of what she wanted but it was perfect for now, she’d take what she could get, and she wanted him so badly, needed him, loved him.

The bed creaked ominously—it was her childhood bed, after all—but she was too busy kissing every sound out of his mouth to care.

“Lucy,” he whispered, in between kissing her all over, saying her name over and over again like a prayer.

She’d said his name back at him, passed it right back, “Garcia” chanted at him as he pushed her closer and closer to the peak again.

When he shuddered to a finish inside of her, she couldn’t have kept the stupid, deliriously happy grin off her face if she’d tried.

“You’re so beautiful,” he told her, pushing the hair back out of her face, his thumb stroking her cheek. He looked like a man who’d seen proof of God.

And she felt her heart expanding, exploding, filling up until she thought she might cry because she’d known that she wouldn’t get what she wanted with Wyatt, she had always known that. But at some point she’d stopped hoping for anything with Flynn as well, and now…

She remembered lying there afterwards, her head on his chest, his arm around her, thinking, _here is one person who I don’t have to share. One person who won’t ever leave._

Two days later, Flynn was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Lucy tried not to hold her breath as she dialed Flynn’s number.

What did you say to the man you’d fallen in love with, had sex with, then hadn’t spoken to for two years after he’d run out on you?

To be fair, he hadn’t exactly just run out on _her_ …

She took a deep breath. Forced herself to exhale and take another one. This shouldn’t be hard. Wyatt and Flynn had been her best friends once. That camaraderie had to be under there somewhere. Right?

“Who the—”

“Freemason!” Lucy said quickly, blurting out their code word before Flynn could just growl something ominous and hang up the phone. They'd chosen it after the running joke had developed about "looking for the Freemason treasure next" and all the _National Treasure_ questions people asked them about (there was no such treasure, as Lucy had proven in an article for National Geographic last year,  _Impossible Treasures_ ).

She could practically hear Flynn's gears turning.

“…Lucy?”

The strange tentativeness in his voice broke her heart. Even though he had every damn right to be tentative, if he was in front of her in person she just might punch him in the nose. “Flynn. Hi.”

She could feel Mason and Jess watching her with interest. Mason’s was probably professional curiosity. It was his money on the line, after all. But Jess was obviously and not-at-all subtly staring with wide-eyed interest, a smirk playing at the corners of her mouth.

Well, at least if she thought that Lucy and Flynn were—that meant she wouldn’t—

_Focus, Lucy. Focus._

“Hi,” Flynn replied. His voice was soft, oddly light, the way it got when he was trying to be casual or gentle but was holding back a maelstrom of emotions and opinions.

Lucy took a deep breath. Flynn had always appreciated honesty, no matter how blunt it was. “You’re in Israel with Wyatt, yes? Any reason he’s not answering his phone? Jess is worried sick.”

“Did you hear that, Logan?” Flynn called. Ah, so they were back to last names now. Fun. “Your ex-wife is worried about you. You sure about that ‘ex’ part?”

“You’re telling me a weird secret society is after you and _I’m_ the crazy one?” Wyatt responded.

Lucy’s throat almost closed up. Hearing Wyatt’s voice on top of Flynn’s, hearing their banter… it was so close to old times. Part of her wanted to break down.

“I literally gave you _evidence_ , there were people _shooting_ at us, and you’d still rather call me crazy than actually say I’m right,” Flynn shot back. “When I gave you my word—”

“Forgive me for not believing your ‘word’,” Wyatt spat, “Seeing how that went the last time. Remember that? I think there was a whole, ‘we’re a team you have my word’ promise at one point? How well did that work out for us, huh?”

This was going to dissolve into something very nasty, very quickly. “Boys,” she said, firmly, almost without thinking about it. “Stop.”

To her amazement, they still listened. And stopped instantly.

The others couldn’t tell exactly what was being said, but they could certainly hear the angry voices of the men go silent.

“Wow,” Jiya said, appreciatively. “I wish I had that power.”

“Trust me,” Jess whispered, “If I had that power I’d rule the world.”

Lucy ignored them both and took a deep breath. “Listen. I’m joining you two. I know what you’re after—”

Both men burst out with objections.

“No,” Wyatt said. “Absolutely not, no, you’re not—”

“Lucy you know I’d appreciate your expertise but if you think for one second I’m letting you—”

“Excuse me,” Lucy said, feeling her blood get up, “If you two think you’re going to treat me like some blushing maiden—I was shot at in Germany if you two aren’t forgetting—”

“I’m not letting you—”

“Oh, _you’re_ not letting _me_ —”

“Lucy I’ll be damned if you put yourself in danger because of me—”

“Wait, hold on, are you actually suggesting that you messed up? For once?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Jess said. She snatched the phone from Lucy’s hand. “Your three-way yelling is normally pretty endearing to watch but we are on a time crunch here. Wyatt—”

“I’m sorry,” Wyatt said immediately, and Lucy couldn’t help but wince. How many times had he had to say that to Jess over the years? _I’m sorry I missed the party; our plane was delayed. I’m sorry I can’t be there this weekend, we got a new lead._

“Stop apologizing,” Jess replied. “Flynn, tell Lucy what the hell is going on.”

Jess then handed the phone back to Lucy.

“Lucy?”

“I’m here.”

There was some quiet murmuring between the two men, something Lucy couldn’t pick up, and then Flynn said,

“Listen. I went to Israel to figure out this Copper Scroll treasure. I had been studying it for months and I had a good idea of where the treasure was. Now, it makes sense of that some of it would get carried away, either by Romans or by the Jews themselves to rebuild, but the amount of gold described as hidden away couldn’t possibly all have been taken.

“The first few locations I went to were a bust, but after the fourth location, I realized I was being followed. And not by anyone that I recognized. Not a part of any government, I didn’t think. So I called up Wyatt, told him I needed some help—figured he’d recognize if it was someone from a fringe group.”

That was fair, Lucy had to admit. Wyatt would be the expert. And he was the kind of man you’d want to have your back in a fight.

“We were attacked when we went to the next location—by a group, not just one person. They were wearing these uniforms with a symbol on them and words in German. We managed to look it up.”

Lucy gestured for a pad of paper and a pen. Mason handed them to her. “Go on.”

“Rittenhouse,” Flynn told her. “That’s the group’s name. There were about ten of them, but Wyatt and I downed about three.”

“Four,” Wyatt interjected.

“Three, that shot was non-lethal.”

“And I’m sure he managed to survive the long road trip to the nearest hospital,” Wyatt snapped.

“Jiya,” Lucy said, ignoring the bickering, “Look up Rittenhouse.”

“On it.”

“And you’re certain this is actually a thing?” Lucy asked Flynn. “This isn’t one of your flights of fancy?”

“Trust me, whoever these people are, they weren’t from around here,” Flynn said. “And they were shooting at us.”

“I’ll put someone on it,” Lucy said. “Now give me your location so I can fly out there.”

“No,” both Wyatt and Flynn said simultaneously.

“For the last time,” Lucy said, definitely not in the mood for this bullshit, “You do not get to tell me what I can and cannot do. I was the one who got you both into this treasure hunting shit, remember? Me. It wasn’t your idea. It was mine. So you don’t get to ask for my help, and then tell me I can’t be involved.”

There was a long silence. Lucy couldn’t begin to guess what either man was thinking. Once, all she had always known. There was nothing about either of them that she thought she didn’t know or couldn’t read.

Now, she had no idea. It scared her.

“Fine,” Flynn bit out at last. “We’ll meet you at the airport.”

Lucy looked over at Mason and mouthed _plane tickets?_

“I can do you one better than that,” Mason told her. He gave her one of those pleased smiles that, all right, she had kind of missed. Mason could be a pain in the ass, but he was also one of the most passionate men she knew. He really cared about the art she’d unearthed.

“Be careful,” she said, because she couldn’t help it. People were shooting at Flynn and Wyatt and she—she still—

After two years. She still.

“We promise,” Flynn said.

Wyatt snorted. “I’ll do my best to keep him from getting shot, how’s that sound?”

“More realistic,” Lucy admitted, smiling in spite of herself.

“Stay safe yourself,” Flynn said, his voice soft and low.

“Call us,” Wyatt added, in that rough pleading voice he had. “If there’s any problems.”

It was so like how it used to be, that Lucy had to close her eyes. Partly to soak up the sound of their voices and partly to prevent herself from crying. “I will,” she told them.

She hung up before she could say anything else, something stupid.

 

* * *

 

“I think this wins for worst place we’ve ever holed up,” Wyatt muttered.

They were currently ‘holed up’ in a rundown apartment near the airport, and by ‘holed up’ he meant _squatting_. Forget the Rittenhouse people that were apparently after them, if the police caught them they’d be arrested for just being in this place illegally.

“If this is the worst place you’ve ever been in…” Flynn chuckled, shaking his head. “I forget, you and the army. You were in… bases and with backup and all organized.”

“And you were hiding out in places like this all the time, huh? Roughing it with the rebels?” Wyatt asked.

It was meant to come out as biting but it came out too fond, too soft, and he had to turn away.

God damn he hated this. Hated that he was still swept back so easily into the wildfire that was Flynn. Not to mention caught in the soft, warm glow of Lucy.

Lucy. Just hearing her voice over the phone and he wanted to cross the damn ocean to get back to her.

“She sounded well,” Flynn said, because Flynn was a goddamn masochist.

“She did,” Wyatt acknowledged.

Awkward silence fell.

 

* * *

 

_December 12 th, 2015_

It was over the holidays.

The semester was over and so they were meeting up to do a small trip before the next semester started up.

They all met at the airport since they’d had to take different flights in. And Lucy had… had appeared bearing two brightly wrapped parcels.

“One for each of you!” she said, grinning.

When they’d opened them, Flynn had started laughing.

She’d made them Faberge eggs.

“I went to one of those pottery places,” Lucy explained. “They let you mold it yourself and then paint it and they fire it up for you and bake it.”

Flynn’s was done up in burgundy, Wyatt’s in green. They were painted in lovely swirls and abstract designs. Lucy had always underestimated her talent in art.

Something in Wyatt’s chest had squeezed tight, and he’d looked up at her, and had the thought—

_God, I’d spend the rest of my life with you if I could._

That was when he knew.

He was in love with her. Had been, he realized as he thought back, for months and months.

He had never cheated on Jess, not physically. But in his heart, in his hopes and wishes…

He’d started cheating on her that very moment.

Wyatt didn’t think he’d ever forgive himself for that.

 

* * *

 

_Present Day_

 

Lucy knew she had other things to do. She had so much work she had to rearrange now.

But she couldn’t… she couldn’t. She was in her office and staring at all the things she had to do, and all she could think about the way Flynn and Wyatt’s voices had sounded.

How much she still missed them.

So she did what she always did when she couldn’t handle things.

She called Amy.

“Hey,” her sister said, picking up on the first ring. “How’s it going?”

Lucy burst into tears.

“Honey!” She could hear Amy literally dropping whatever it was she was doing (it sounded like a book). “Lucy, oh my God, is everything okay?”

Lucy sat down at her desk chair. “I just talked to Flynn. And Wyatt.”

“Oh my God. How? Why? Are they apologizing? I can fight them for you. Do you need me to fight them for you?”

Lucy couldn’t help but laugh a little. Amy was always ready to defend her sister’s honor. “No, no, it’s—they’re in trouble. And for once I don’t think it’s their fault.”

She relayed everything to Amy that she knew. Amy was quiet through the whole thing—she had a temper but she was good at listening and not interrupting.

“And you’re just going to go after them?” she asked when Lucy was finished. “Just like that? After what they did?”

Lucy wiped at her eyes, unable to stop herself from continuing to sniffle like an idiot. “I can’t just leave them there to fend for themselves.”

“You’re still in love with them, aren’t you?” Amy asked. That was Amy. Always getting to the heart of the matter.

Lucy sighed. She didn’t see the point in denying it. “Yes,” she moaned, burying her face in the crook of her elbow. Ugh, she was getting snot all over her shirt now.

“Oh, hon,” Amy said, sighing. “I know, it sucks, it really does.”

“It’s not fair,” Lucy admitted. “I don’t see them for two years, it’s not supposed to work like that, they’re not allowed to just waltz back in and make it all be like… like it was before.”

“It’s not how it was before,” Amy replied gently. “Things are different now. Wyatt’s not married, for one thing.”

“That won’t change anything,” Lucy said.

“Lucy, for the love of God, what happened?” Amy asked.

Lucy reached for her box of tissues. She usually saved them for students who came in having emotional breakdowns during midterms and finals. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re still broken-hearted over it so I’d say it matters. Honestly, do I need to fight them? I could break Wyatt’s nose, help it match Flynn’s.”

“I’m fine, Amy, I promise. I just… needed a good cry. That’s all.”

“Well you know I’m always good for you to cry to me,” Amy said softly, warmly. “But maybe this is a second chance. An opportunity to make things right between you.”

Lucy smiled. “Thank you. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Lucy hit end on the call and stared into the empty space in front of her.

An opportunity. That was what Amy said it was.

But was it?

 

* * *

 

“Got anything?” Jess asked.

Jiya shook her head, the affect a little glitchy over the webcam. “Not really. Rittenhouse was the name of some minor politician and clockmaker during the Revolutionary War but that’s about it.”

Jess continued to flip through the books in front of her. She’d just grabbed anything in the library that had looked like it might be useful.

“I’m not finding anything on Rittenhouse and Israel,” she admitted. “I know that the Russians had a lot of influence in the Middle East during the Cold War. America did the same. Could this be a remnant of that?”

“Rittenhouse is German, not Russian,” Jiya said, “But it’s a possibility.”

There was silence for a few minutes as Jiya typed away. Then she froze. For a moment, she was so still that Jess thought the connection had gone bad.

“Jess?”

“Yeah?”

A slow smile spread over Jiya’s face. “I got something. Good old NSA. It’s not much, but, I’ve got mentions of it.”

Jess grinned. “Let’s dig a little deeper, then.”

 

* * *

 

Lucy knocked on Denise’s door tentatively.

“Come in,” was the response.

Lucy entered, closing the door behind her. “Mrs. Christopher?”

“Denise, please Lucy, you make me feel like I’m teaching high school again.” Denise smiled at her. She was sitting at her desk but set aside her papers. “Is everything all right?”

Lucy nodded. “I’m afraid I have a… a rather big favor to ask of you.”

Denise indicated for Lucy to sit down in one of the chairs in front of the desk. Lucy did so, feeling herself smile nervously. No matter how long she knew Denise or how close they got, she still couldn’t forget that this woman was her boss.

“Some colleagues of mine called me,” Lucy said. “They’re stuck on an expedition and need my help. I know that I have a responsibility here, but… but really, we’re about to go on Thanksgiving break. I can give my students one class off. It shouldn’t mean my being gone more than a few days.”

Denise leveled a look at her. “These colleagues wouldn’t be Garcia Flynn and Wyatt Logan, by any chance?”

Lucy could feel her face heating up. “Am I that obvious?”

“You’ve turned down expedition after expedition since you three split up,” Denise noted. “If you finally said yes to someone, it means it’s one or both of those two.”

Lucy bit her lip. “I’m—they’re in trouble, Denise, you know I wouldn’t just up and leave like this if it wasn’t important. I always made sure my trips—our trips—worked around the semester schedule.”

Denise pressed her lips together. “It’s not that I don’t trust how responsible you are, Lucy. But both those men could be wild cards. Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”

“I can handle myself.”

“You can, very well,” Denise admitted. “But it’s hard to be logical when you’re nursing a broken heart.”

It caught Lucy by surprise. She hadn’t thought—she’d never—

Denise gave her a small, sad smile. “You didn’t have to say anything. I’d seen you three interacting enough to know.”

“My unrequited feelings are mine to deal with, and I will deal with them,” Lucy said. “I won’t let it interfere with my work or my ability to solve this issue and get both men back safely to the U.S.”

“What exactly is going on?” Denise asked. “What’s the trouble?”

Lucy couldn’t think of a quick enough lie. And Denise would probably find out the truth in the end anyway. She was uncannily good at discovering things like that.

She gave her a brief explanation. Denise didn’t quite frown, but she got that disapproving look on her face that was almost worse.

“Lucy,” she said, her voice gentle. “This sounds unnecessarily dangerous. I think these men need to contact the embassy or something. They don’t need you going out there.”

“These people, whoever they are, are after the same treasure that Flynn is,” Lucy said. “And they’re not natives. They’re not trying to find or defend what belongs to their people. These are white people, from some kind of society, and I think we’ve dealt with enough of those to know they aren’t good news. Flynn has gotten good at his history but you and I both know I’m the one who should be out there. I’m the historian, I’m the expert, I’m the one who wrote a goddamn essay for the National Geographic last year on impossible treasures and the Copper Scroll was one of the things I talked about!

“I—I’m, I do, I care for both Flynn and Wyatt. But I’m not going to stand here while they get to run around like I’m some, some maiden in a tower. And I know that whoever’s after them is after this treasure, whether it’s real or not, and I’m their best chance of figuring out if this treasure really exists or not and I’m their best chance at getting ahead of these people.”

Denise looked at her for a moment as Lucy caught her breath, not realizing until that moment how close she’d come to shouting.

“This isn’t an Indiana Jones film,” Denise said. “These… people, whoever they are, they aren’t going to be Nazi caricatures. I care about you too, Lucy, this whole school does. We don’t want you getting hurt.”

“I’ll be careful,” Lucy promised. “My goal is to get in and get them out, untangle this mess.”

Denise looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded. “All right. But I expect you back by the time Thanksgiving break is over.”

Lucy couldn’t help the grin that burst out. “Thank you!” she said, running around the desk to hug Denise.

“Do me just one favor,” Denise said as Lucy pulled back.

“Of course.”

Denise’s eyes darkened dangerously. “Tell those two knuckleheads that if you do end up hurt on this trip? I’m coming for both their hides.”

Lucy smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”


	5. Chapter 5

Flynn hung up the phone, weighing it in his hand. Lucy was coming. Lucy was putting herself in danger. Because of him. Because he’d been reckless.

He should’ve researched more. He should’ve looked into the possibility that he wasn’t the only one after this treasure.

He should’ve…

“I can’t believe this,” Wyatt growled. “She shouldn’t be coming here.”

“You agreed to it.”

“Because you know how Lucy gets when she’s in a mood,” Wyatt said, throwing his arms into the air because he always accused Flynn of being dramatic but he was just as bad when his temper flared. “You’re the one who got us into this mess, you should’ve said no!”

“I didn’t make her come here and last I checked she had free will and neither I nor anyone else can make her do or not do anything,” Flynn pointed out. “We can’t control her.”

“I never should’ve gotten involved in this,” Wyatt seethed, storming around the apartment.

“Then go,” Flynn snapped. “Leave, if it doesn’t suit you.”

“What, like you did?” Wyatt shot back.

Flynn felt like he’d been slapped. “You certainly never gave me a reason to stay.”

“Oh, it’s my fault now?”

“You acted like it disgusted you!” Flynn bellowed.

Wyatt stormed over, getting right in his face. “You didn’t just leave me that day, Flynn. You left Lucy. You _left_ her. She—she needed you, she wanted you, and you just—”

Flynn felt like his insides were made of snakes, sliding and twisting around one another, aliens underneath his own skin. “You idiot,” he growled. “The only reason she was with me was because she couldn’t have you!”

He didn’t wait for Wyatt’s response, although he got a good glimpse of his face—his openmouthed, wet eyed, shell-shocked face—before he stormed out the door.

“Where are you going?” Wyatt yelled after him.

“To get a drink!” Flynn yelled back.

He needed a stiff one. Or three.

 

* * *

 

Mason drove Lucy and Jess down to the small airfield. “Why book you on a commercial flight when you can just have a pilot at your command?”

“That’s really not necessary,” Lucy objected. “We’re not royalty, Mason.”

“Nonsense.” Mason chuckled. “You might need to fly out under the radar and you’ll need a pilot you can rely on. Rufus is the best. He’s technically getting his PhD in Engineering, but he loves flying and this pays his student bills.”

Mason drove them onto the airfield, parking the car right out on the tarmac. All three got out, Jess folding her arms and frowning. “You sure about this?”

Lucy shook her head. “Not at all. But I have to help out.”

Jess sighed. “You’re too forgiving to them.”

Lucy tried to keep herself looking normal. “I’m sorry, with whatever happened between you and Wyatt. I know you had to forgive him a lot over the years.”

Jess shook her head, the corner of her mouth curling upward into a smile. “Oh, you.”

She pulled Lucy into a hug. Lucy was startled but accepted it gratefully. She buried her face in Jess’s shoulder. She was still so scared. She had no idea what she was going to do when she saw the boys again. But she’d be damned if she’d let them stay in danger without her there to help them figure this mess out.

“Listen to me,” Jess said. “Don’t you feel bad. Give ‘em hell.”

“The boys or these Rittenhouse people?” Lucy asked.

Jess chuckled. “How about both?” She pulled back, smiling. “And I’m fine, Lucy. Don’t shoulder someone else’s guilt. Anything between Wyatt and me—it’s between Wyatt and me. If you’re going to fly into a righteous rage at them then it should be because of whatever they did to you. Not because you’re trying to defend my honor. I can do that myself.”

Lucy laughed in spite of herself. “If you insist.”

Jess winked at her. “As a matter of fact I do.”

“You could come,” Lucy offered.

“Over my dead body,” Jess said.

“All right then,” Lucy said, laughing again. “Look after yourself.”

“You too, Lucy.”

“Lucy?” Mason called. “Come over here and meet your pilot!”

Lucy gave Jess a quick hug and then hurried over. Standing next to Mason was another, taller man, about Lucy’s age. He had the look about him of a man who’d once been gangly but had eventually bulked up to get rid of it, an open, easy face and a big smile.

“Hi, I’m Rufus.”

“Lucy.”

They shook hands.

“Where am I flying you?” Rufus asked. “Connor was dodgy about the details.”

“Israel,” Lucy told him.

Rufus turned and raised his eyebrows at Mason. “Really,” he said in a flat tone of voice.

“Remember how much you’re being paid.”

“Yeah, to be _shot at_ ,” Rufus replied. “What if there’s an air strike while we’re there?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Mason scoffed. “You’ll be perfectly safe. Just hang out in the airport until they’re finished. I can get you into the first class lounge.”

“Is there anywhere you _don’t_ have contacts?” Lucy queried.

Mason just smiled at her.

“You don’t have to fly me,” Lucy told Rufus. “Honestly, I can just take a commercial flight—”

Rufus shook his head rapidly, determinedly. “No. No, I’ve been wanting to meet you for ages. That article you did for Nat Geo? Loved it. And like hell I’m letting you board a commercial flight. If things go bad, those flights out will be flooded. I guarantee a quick way out.”

Mason gave Rufus a proud look and then turned to look at Lucy as if to say, _see_?

Lucy shook her head at him. Mason would always be just a little bit ridiculous.

“Ignore him,” Rufus said, apparently also familiar with Mason. He grinned at Lucy. “What the hell. I’m due a little adventure, right? I’m always hearing about Mason’s misspent youth, figures I should have one of my own.”

“I knew you would take my advice eventually,” Mason said.

Rufus mouthed _don’t listen to a word he says_ at Lucy behind Mason’s back. Lucy had to hold in her laugh.

“I think we’re going to get along, Rufus,” she told him.

Rufus gave her a roguish salute.

“So,” Rufus asked as he helped her to load her things into the plane. “I read about your, uh, career after I read your Nat Geo article. It’s Logan and Flynn you’re going after now, right?”

“Yup,” Lucy replied, hoping Rufus wouldn’t ask any further questions.

“Any reason why you three split up?” he asked. “Seemed rather sudden.”

Lucy sighed inwardly. “My mother died,” she said.

Rufus snorted. “As if. Your mom encouraged you to go out into the field, she’d hate it if you stayed just at the university.”

Lucy looked him up and down. “Most people buy that lie.”

“Most people want to believe the easy answer,” Rufus replied. “But I’ve never been that kind of person.”

“Oh?”

Rufus shrugged. “If I was, I’d be working as a janitor or something. But I wasn’t content with that answer. I wanted to be something more. And with Connor’s help… that’s what I am. I’m one of the top ranked pilots in the country and I’m going to have a PhD soon. And it’s not because I accepted the easy answers people wanted to spoon feed me.”

Lucy smiled at him. “Rufus, I think I like you very much.” She sighed. The partial truth wouldn’t hurt, would it? “We had a falling out. Flynn wanted to go after a treasure ship. I was interested in artwork and history, not rocks that meant nothing except what the stock market assigned them. And Wyatt was feeling a strain with Jessica. It was just time. All things have to end.”

Rufus nodded. “I get that.” Then he paused. “But you’re… it’s odd, that’s all. You running after them at the drop of the hat like this.”

Lucy smiled, albeit sadly. “Well, it was a very good thing while it lasted.”

 

* * *

 

_January 23 rd, 2016_

 

Lucy was laughing so hard that her sides ached. “Garcia you _didn’t_.”

Wyatt nearly fell off his chair with laughter. “You’re an asshole,” he gasped. “You’re—a complete—asshole.”

“I’m a man who gets even,” Flynn replied.

Lucy wiped at her eyes. “Nothing,” she said, “Nothing will ever top that.”

“And I thought the Army pranks were bad,” Wyatt said, grabbing the bottle of champagne and pouring himself another drink.

Lucy laughed again, but it turned into a yawn. They were all running high on adrenaline and alcohol and were exhausted after digging around in a landfill all day—but they’d done it. They’d found Picasso’s _Les pigeon aux petit pois._

Everyone else in the world had given up. Said it was impossible. But they had done it. They had recovered a lost masterpiece—and thank God it wasn’t ripped, the thieves had wrapped it up enough for that—but it would need some restoring work.

Lucy could still feel the electric hum of triumph in her veins. _They had done it!_

She didn’t realize she had tipped sideways until she landed with her head in Wyatt’s lap. “Ow,” she proclaimed.

She looked up to see Flynn and Wyatt both looking down at her, wide, fond smiles on their faces.

“I think you’ve had enough,” Flynn declared.

“I’m fine,” Lucy replied, but the words didn’t seem to come out of her mouth the way they’d sounded in her head.

Wyatt and Flynn looked at one another, doing that thing where they had silent conversations with just a look. She did that with Wyatt, too, and with Flynn. They all did it. Together.

“Let’s get you to bed,” Wyatt said.

He picked her up easily—wow, very easily—and passed her to Flynn, who scooped her up so that her head was on his shoulder.

That was when it happened.

She felt so warm and curled up against Flynn. And she wanted—she wanted Wyatt to come, too. She wanted them to just… curl up in bed together, be connected the way that they were with their eyes…

She reached out towards Wyatt without thinking. She saw the stricken look in his eyes, the guilt.

Oh. Jess. Right.

She couldn’t have Wyatt. And Flynn…

Daring, dashing Flynn, like a bandit or something out of an old silent film. He couldn’t possibly want her. She was a klutzy nerd, she couldn’t possibly…

“Oh, no, Luce,” Wyatt said, standing up. “Crap, Luce, don’t cry.”

“What’s wrong?” Flynn asked.

“I just need sleep,” she told them. “I just want to sleep.”

She didn’t add that she just wanted to sleep with them beside her.

But that was the moment it solidified for her, the truth she’d been trying to ignore.

Her bed had never felt as big or as empty as it did that night, after Flynn had tucked her in.

 

* * *

 

_Present Day_

Jess waited until she got home before she dialed the number. She’d been there when Jiya had read it off to Lucy and, well, after so many years writing down orders as a waitress she had a damn good memory.

She grabbed a beer, put her feet up, and made the call.

“Lucy?” Flynn’s voice came over the phone. He sounded…

“Flynn, are you drunk?” Jess asked.

“Jessica?” He’d always called her by her full first name. It was unusual, but she’d always liked it. Flynn was the sort of person that made himself the exception to the rules and got you to love him for it.

“That’s me,” Jess replied. “Tell me, is that wayward ex-boy of mine around?”

She heard the sound of what seemed to be scuffling in the background, and then arguing. Then Wyatt’s voice saying, “If you’re going to drink yourself to death at least do it in the safety of the room, jackass.”

“Wyatt?” Jess called.

There was more scuffling, then Flynn cursing in Croatian, and then Wyatt’s voice came clear over the phone, “Jess?”

“Do you have a moment?”

“Once I get this idiot back to the room,” Wyatt replied.

Jess waited patiently as across the phone line she heard more arguing, and the sound of grunting as Wyatt obviously helped Flynn back up the stairs or something. She wondered how they couldn’t hear the underlying worry and fondness in each other’s voices as they snapped at each other.

Finally, just Wyatt was back on the line. “What’s up? Is everything okay?”

“I’m better now that I know you’re all right,” Jess replied. “But knowing you were being shot at would’ve helped.”

There was a pause at the end of the line, and then Wyatt said. “I’m sorry.”

Jess closed her eyes. It still hurt to hear that. She was so tired of him apologizing. Their entire relationship was Wyatt apologizing.

“Stop,” she told him. “I know you’re sorry, Wyatt. But I think it’s time we were really honest about what you’re sorry for.”

There was silence on the other end.

Jess plowed forward. She hadn’t realized how difficult this would be. Even though she’d made peace with it long ago, neither of them had ever said the truth out loud. It hurt.

“I know that you—I always knew that there was a time when you stopped loving me as a wife and started loving me as a best friend. We’re always best friends, Wyatt. We always will be. I love you—I—I always will and you were my first love and that matters. Don’t think it doesn’t. But we had both moved on. Even before… before the other two.”

“Jess.” Wyatt’s voice was hoarse. “Jess, I never—I didn’t—I wouldn’t cheat on you.”

“I never said that you did,” Jess replied. She’d meant what she’d said to Lucy. Wyatt had been loyal, and he would have kept being loyal, in actions if not in spirit. “Wyatt. I know.”

“I didn’t mean to.” Wyatt sounded strangled. “It was—it just happened.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She had to get this out, no matter how much her eyes burned, and her throat strangled her words. “Before those two, we were just together by habit. You know it. They just… helped us to realize it.

“You were an escape for me, Wyatt, and I know I was yours. High school, the town, our families it… it was awful, all of it. And you—you were so good to me and I loved being good to you. We liked taking care of each other, didn’t we?”

Wyatt made a strangled kind of noise. “Yes. We did.”

“But I… I knew. Wyatt, I—God I don’t think you even know how they look—how you look at them.”

“Jess—”

“This is your second chance,” she told him. “Don’t waste it Wyatt, please. I’ll always be here and I know you’ll always be there for me and I expect you to be, dammit, you’ll always be my best friend. But you’re not my lover. And I’m not yours. I’m not supposed to be. So just—swallow your damn pride and go after them. Please? For me?”

There was a long pause, and then Wyatt spoke.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I treated you… I should’ve ended things. I knew I didn’t—but I thought you still loved me and I felt like I owed you, you were the only good thing in my life for so long, Jess, you were the only thing. I had to…”

Jess’s heart ached for him. She wished they’d done this in person. She wished she’d insisted on it at one of their lunches or something. She wanted to hold him and let him cry the way she knew that he wanted to, the way he couldn’t with a drunken Flynn he had to take care of.

“I had to be loyal,” Wyatt finished. “I had to. I owed you.”

“You didn’t owe me anything,” Jess replied. “Except honesty.”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re tired of me saying it but I am. I screwed you over so badly, Jess. I really did. I was an idiot.”

“You still are, if you don’t do something about Lucy and Flynn,” Jess told him. “It’s okay. I forgive you. I did before you apologized. And… please don’t, beat yourself up about this. I know you are. Especially about Flynn, Wyatt, you know I knew, you didn’t have to say it, you…”

“If my dad had—”

“He would’ve killed you, I know.” And she meant that literally. A part of her heart that was black and cold still hated Wyatt’s father.

He had met the end that he deserved.

“I know,” Wyatt whispered. She could hear him swallow. “About that. Jess. I always knew it was you.”

Jess gripped the phone, squeezing her eyes shut.

He had met the end that he deserved. Wyatt had been out bootlegging. He’d said he’d run away for good, that he wouldn’t go back, but it hadn’t been the first time Wyatt had run away only for his father to find him or for Wyatt to return to the place that was—for all its awfulness—familiar to him.

It was easy enough to slip the bleach into his drink.

Even easier to trick him into drinking it. All she’d had to do was flash her cleavage and sit in his lap.

He’d had plenty of enemies.

Who would suspect head cheerleader and class president Jessica Moore?

“I guess we both had secrets,” she replied, her voice gone soft.

There was silence for a long while.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s okay to love them. You need to know that. It’s not a sin. It’s okay.”

There was another long silence. Then Wyatt spoke.

“Thank you,” he told her. “For this. And for… that. And for… I really didn’t ever deserve you, did I?”

Jess laughed. “Maybe not. But you’re stuck with me.”

Wyatt laughed wetly. “I love you, you know. Even if it wasn’t. That way. I do love you.”

“And I you.” Her throat was loosening up now, even if her eyes were wet. “Always.”

She’d meant it—he’d been the only good thing in her life growing up. After Kevin’s death her family had never been the same. It wasn’t abuse. But it was neglect.

Killing a man for him was the least she could do.

“Go after them,” she told him. “Be happy the way you’re supposed to. Let’s live the way we were supposed to. And then I want all three of you to come home. I’ve missed my best friends. Promise me?”

“I promise.”

“And you’ll tell them?”

Silence.

“Wyatt Logan.”

“…I’ll try.”

Well, that was probably the best she could hope for. “All right. Give Lucy a hug when she lands. And splash some cold water at Flynn for me.”

“Will do.”

“And be safe.”

“Always.”

Jess hung up the phone, feeling simultaneously exhausted and lighter inside.

Now the ball was in Wyatt’s court.

 

* * *

 

_June 17 th, 2013_

 

The last couple of weeks had been insanity.

It wasn’t Hell. Wyatt had seen Hell, thanks, and this wasn’t it. But the army had a sense of cohesion to it. By the time he’d gotten overseas, he and the rest of his unit had a connection. A bond.

Meanwhile, he and Flynn had started out by punching each other.

But they’d finally started to come together as a team. They’d successfully found the first part of the templar treasure today. He and Flynn had actually worked well together, bluffing their way through some local police. Flynn had later pulled him out of the way when a section of crumbling wall had given way. It would’ve sent Wyatt to his death otherwise. And he’d shared a dirty poem he knew in German that had made Flynn laugh in a way that Wyatt hadn’t thought the man was capable of.

And Lucy, relying on them, letting Wyatt boost her up, trusting the men to translate the German for her, finally relaxing a little and letting this be fun instead of just single-mindedly focused on winning the damn dare she’d been set.

They’d known each other for two weeks, but this was the first time they’d felt like a team.

Now they were at a bar celebrating. Lucy was in between them, since they’d found that she tended to get hit on very easily and nothing got her temper up faster than that.

She was currently struggling to order something in German. Flynn was trying to hide his amused smile in his drink. Wyatt looked at her and—

And suddenly realized just why all those men were hitting on her.

Her cheeks were pleasantly flushed and her eyes were sparkling, her dark hair curling around her face.

He stamped the thoughts down. Ignored them. It was natural to be attracted to a beautiful woman, especially one as whip-smart and good-hearted as Lucy.

Didn’t mean he had to think about it. It would go away soon enough.

Nothing to worry about.

 

* * *

 

_Present Day_

Once they were settled on the plane, Lucy pulled up Jiya on the computer. When she’d pictured flying in with Rufus she’d thought of a small little plane but apparently whether it was just one passenger or one hundred, nothing but a first-class jet complete with a full wet bar and Wifi would do for the friends of Connor Mason.

“Captain,” Jiya said, smiling. “First Officer Marri reporting for duty.”

Lucy rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “You and your Star Trek.”

“We’re all good to go,” Rufus said, walking in from the cockpit. “Ready to take off when you are.” He paused, seeing that Lucy was talking to someone. “Who’s this?”

“Rufus, meet Jiya, our hacker extraordinaire. She’s the Q to my Bond,” Lucy said. “Jiya, this is Rufus, my pilot.”

“I guess that makes me Pussy Galore,” Rufus quipped.

Jiya laughed. “I like this one.”

“I’m not sure…” Rufus looked thoughtful. “Did I just hear that you’re a _Star Trek_ girl?”

“That’s right.” Jiya looked proud.

Rufus sighed mournfully and shook his head. “It’ll never work. I’m _Star Wars_ , you’re _Star Trek_ … our friendship is just not meant to be.”

Jiya laughed.

Lucy looked from one to the other. She was kind of feeling like she should just leave the room. “So, uh, Jiya?”

Jiya coughed, embarrassed. “Right. Um. Sorry. So. Rittenhouse. Looks like they go as far back as World War II. Before that they were under a different name—and that keeps happening throughout history. Every fifty or hundred years or so they changed names. Almost like they’re running or hiding from something.”

“It’s a good way to keep a secret society secret,” Lucy admitted.

“They popped up on the NSA’s radar last year,” Jiya said, typing away, “because they were sniffing around in the Middle East. And that includes looking into people who were big players in the Middle East but on the American side, spies and the like. People who’d been out in the desert.”

“Possibly people who might know about or have run into the treasure,” Lucy guessed.

Jiya nodded. “I’m still trying to turn up more but Jess has compiled a good amount of information on the historical front. I’m organizing it all here with what I’ve got and then I’ll send it over to you. And I’m keeping tabs on the boys through Flynn’s phone like you asked. One of them went to a bar for a while but now they’re apparently squatting in some abandoned building.”

Squatting. Of course. Why check into a hotel when you could hide out in a probably condemned and definitely hazardous pile of rubble? But it was smart, Lucy supposed, if people were after you. And if your name was Garcia Flynn or Wyatt Logan and you were too damned dramatic to just check into a cheap motel under an assumed name.

“Wow, you got all this in a day?” Rufus breathed. “You’re brilliant."

Was she imagining things, or did Jiya blush?

“Thanks, Jiya,” Lucy told her. “You’re the best.”

“So you keep telling me.” Jiya grinned. “I’ll catch you later. Nice to meet you, Rufus.”

“Likewise,” Rufus stammered.

Lucy hung up and looked at him. “So.”

“What?” Rufus asked, blinking at her innocently. “She’s a smart woman. I was complimenting her.”

“Uh-huh.” Lucy smiled at him but let it go for now. “Let’s get this bird in the air, shall we?”

Time to track down her boys so that she could slap them in person rather than just verbally over the phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I adore Jess and I just love the idea of her as a badass morally gray assassin type person.


	6. Chapter 6

Flynn rubbed at his eyes as the sunlight crept in through the windows and tried to assassinate him.

“Morning sunshine,” Wyatt said.

“You don’t have to shout,” Flynn grumbled. God, it was like the sunbeams were tiny little daggers piercing his eyes.

Wyatt seemed to think about that. “I should shout, actually. It would make up for all the trouble you’ve put me in. And Lucy.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Flynn said. He sat up—big mistake. Ow.

“Here.” Wyatt handed him a bottle of water. “I figured we can get some coffee on the way.”

Flynn nodded, drinking down the water and trying to ignore the way his stomach threatened open rebellion. He needed coffee, stat.

“Right.” He stood up, and nearly fell over, Wyatt’s timely intervention the only thing that kept him on his feet. He used to be a lot better at holding his liquor, back when he’d first lost Lorena and Iris and he’d spent every night drinking himself almost to death and wondering if this would be the night he finally stopped being a coward and actually found a way to end it. To join his family.

He’d never told Lucy, but agreeing to go on the mission with her, agreeing to protect her… it had been what had saved his life.

He’d agreed because he hadn’t had anything better to do and for some reason he kept not pulling the damn trigger, literally or metaphorically.

Then he’d read up on her so that he’d be prepared for the mission. It wasn’t supposed to be anything crazy, just help the American with the locals and the language and any legal stuff she didn’t know about. He’d read her articles online and… and she’d just been so brilliant. So clear cut and sharing history in a way that drew him in, made him love it.

When he’d actually met her, he’d already known that he would like her. But then he’d spied this tiny, beautiful brunette, with a smile that could cut glass, and shaken her hand and something had just… fallen into place.

Just like that.

Wyatt had taken longer. He’d hated the guy’s guts for the first ten minutes, then spent the next few weeks resenting him because he and Wyatt clearly had a lot in common but Wyatt was determined to hate him for some stupid reason and Flynn was not about to take that shit lying down.

Why was he thinking about all of this right now anyway?

Oh. Yeah. He used to be good at holding his liquor.

Guess he’d been more out of practice than he’d thought.

“Jesus, never would’ve pegged you for a lightweight,” Wyatt grumbled, helping Flynn get himself straightened out. “And put on a shirt, fuck’s sake. You’re going to get a sunburn or arrested for indecency or something.”

“Aww, what, you don’t appreciate the view?” Flynn shot back, because it was habit.

Wyatt just tossed his shirt at him and glared.

Yeah, Wyatt had taken a lot longer. But Flynn had fallen in love with him just the same as he had with Lucy.

Heavy footsteps—multiple ones—came from downstairs.

Both men froze.

“Were we followed last night?” Flynn whispered.

Wyatt shook his head. “No, I made sure of it.”

Flynn strained his ears—and that’s when he noticed the language, the accent, the cadence of the voices.

“They’re Israeli,” he whispered. Not Rittenhouse. They’d all spoken with American or European accents.

Wyatt nodded. “Hide the weapons. Let me do the talking.”

Flynn nodded and began to move around as quietly as he could, gathering up their firepower and tucking it behind and under some rubble. He threw some trash over it for good measure. People tended not to check trash or rubble when looking for something—they checked the manmade places like taped to the back of the toilet or stuffed underneath the mattress.

Wyatt quickly ran his fingers through his hair and straightened out his shirt to try and make himself presentable. It was kind of adorable. Then he nodded at Flynn and headed down the stairs.

“Gentlemen,” he heard Wyatt say in English. Then he switched over to Hebrew.

Flynn couldn’t speak Hebrew, at least not modern-day. He knew ancient at this point thanks to Lucy and his own research. From what he knew of Wyatt, though, the guy was sweet-talking the men.

Flynn took a risk and peered down through the small hole in the rotted floorboards in one of the corners. This house had definitely seen better days.

Damn, local police. Someone must have reported them squatting.

Wyatt was a horrible liar but he was good with fellow law enforcement, so long as he was allowed to tell most of the truth. It looked like that was what he was doing now, all friendly smiles and affable stance.

Flynn figured it had to do with his own life, the dangers he’d seen and the situations he’d been in, but he was never able to fully get rid of the air of danger that he seemed to exude. Even when he was flirting with someone to get information, he knew that they responded because he gave off that dangerous vibe, the one that people found attractive. But Wyatt’s strength lay in his ability to make himself seem less dangerous than he was. He was good at playing the boy next door, the pal, the buddy. The man who was friends with everyone.

It meant he often got underestimated, but it also meant nobody ever saw him coming.

Flynn watched as Wyatt continued to talk to the two officers—thank God it was just two of them—gesturing occasionally and smiling, nodding along.

Eventually the two officers stuck out their hands and Wyatt shook them, nodding and saying something that if Flynn had to guess sounded like _of course, no problem officers, we’ll just conclude our business and get out of your hair_.

“What did you tell them?” Flynn hissed when Wyatt got back upstairs.

“That we were CIA, going after this one fringe group, yada yada…” Wyatt replied, going and fetching the guns.

“And they bought that?”

“Of course they did, when you called me I got a hold of Bam Bam, he told me all the latest shit we’re up to over here.”

Flynn wondered if Wyatt would punch him in the face if he walked over and kissed him right then because holy _shit_.

“You do realize that he wasn’t supposed to tell you that information, right?” Flynn said instead. “That’s pretty much treason.”

“I can be very persuasive,” Wyatt replied. “Anyway, I just fed them the information on what we’re actually doing—or well what this one friend of Bam Bam’s is doing, although they’re holed up in a proper hotel—and said to check with their superiors and it should all check out, so sorry about the trouble, we’re trying to keep a low profile, yes we have permission, flashed ‘em my ID and we were all good.”

“Your out-of-date military ID.”

“There might be a smudge on it where the expiration date is.” Wyatt grinned at him. “I got that from _Murder on the Orient Express_.”

Oh yeah, Flynn might have fallen for Lucy first, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t fallen for Wyatt just as hard.

* * *

 

Lucy could hardly keep herself in her seat as the plane descended. On the one hand she was ready to tear herself out of the plane and run up to both men and slap the dickens out of them.

On the other hand, she was tempted to tell Rufus to just turn around and head right back home.

There was a slight jolt as the plane hit the tarmac and Lucy dug her fingernails into her knees. She’d done it. She was in Israel. There was really no going back now. The time to second guess all of this was hours and hours ago when she still could’ve decided not to get on the plane.

…it had an annoyingly _Casablanca_ feel to it.

“You all good back there?” Rufus asked over the handy-dandy intercom.

Lucy pressed the button to respond. “I am, thanks Rufus.”

Honestly, the seat she’d sat in for the flight had been more comfortable than her bed at home. What had Mason ordered it stuffed with, the feathers of angels?

The plane pulled in and came to a halt. A moment later, Rufus emerged. “I’ll be staying here for a short bit to make sure everything’s okay, but then Mason made arrangements for us to be booked into a hotel. Do you want me to check in for you?”

“That’d be great, but Rufus, you’re not my valet or anything,” Lucy noted, unbuckling her seatbelt and standing up to gather her things.

“I mean, I’m already checking in and then spending the next however long lounging by the pool drinking mimosas, so, it’s really no problem,” Rufus replied. “Oh, he booked a room for Flynn and Wyatt too. He told me not to tell you that or you’d object.”

“Those two do not deserve a four star hotel,” Lucy replied. “They deserve one of those crappy semi-creepy motel rooms where you can’t be sure where the stain on the floor is from and you don’t want to know.”

“That was… disturbingly specific,” Rufus noted.

Lucy got her bag and left Rufus to run diagnostics while she got into the airport proper, exchanging phone numbers so they could keep in touch.

She was striding through the airport, her one carryon bag of luggage thrown over her shoulder (there was no way she was packing heavy for this damn last-minute fiasco) when she saw them.

It was their profiles she recognized first. She’d seen them in airports just like this one so many times over the years, and they still stood in the same way. Flynn was leaning against something, posing like someone with a camera was going to jump out from behind the Starbucks counter and start snapping photos. Wyatt was standing next to him, looking like he was resentful of the height difference but trying to be stoic about it.

Flynn saw her first. She saw the way his eyes went soft, and then he nudged Wyatt with his elbow.

Wyatt’s eyes snapped to her, going wide, going soft too.

She wanted to run to them. She wanted to drop her bag and sprint and jump and fling herself into Flynn’s arms because she knew he would catch her and spin her around and she could bury her face in his shoulder and breathe in the smell of him. She wanted to detach herself and then jump into Wyatt’s arms, feeling how securely he held her, how she could just tuck her chin over his shoulder and press cheek to cheek.

But she couldn’t do that. Wyatt might have divorced Jess but it was Jess’s decision, not his. She didn’t know where he stood—and his behavior, the things he’d said… he’d made it pretty clear how he felt about being with her. About being with either her or Flynn.

She wasn’t in the mood to compete with Wyatt’s self-loathing.

And Flynn—

Well, he could go fuck himself for all she was supposed to care. And she did care, she did, but she was not going to be the one who just glossed over what he’d done and pretend that it was all okay when it wasn’t.

She’d give him a hug when he’d damn well earned one.

“Lucy,” Flynn said as she walked up to them, forcing herself to take measured steps and not change her pace. “You look no less…” he paused. Seemed to reconsider his words. “You look good.”

Lucy gave him a quick once-over. Wrinkled shirt, finger-combed hair, dusty pants… for someone who usually dressed impeccably, this was practically rolling around in the mud. And she was pretty sure those heavy eyes were a sign of a hangover. “You look like yourself.”

“Lucy,” Wyatt choked out.

She looked at him. He looked more put together than Flynn i.e. not hungover, but he also looked like seeing her was akin to someone putting an axe in his chest. He wouldn’t make eye contact with her.

“Wyatt,” she replied, keeping her tone neutral. “So, would you two like to show me what you’ve got?”

The two men looked at one another, then back at her. “Sure,” Flynn said, after an awkward pause. “We’ve got a car.”

He stepped slightly to the side, gesturing for her to walk and then falling into step beside her when she did. Wyatt trailed a foot behind, not his usual M.O.

Well, not his M.O. from back in the day. Things were different now.

Back then, Wyatt had always walked on her right or slightly ahead of her. Flynn would give his little bow and walk by her side on her left, or slightly behind her, as if something might attack her from the rear.

She glanced back at Wyatt. He was looking down at the floor.

She wanted to scream. Wanted to ask him if looking into her eyes was going to turn him to stone or something.

But she kept her mouth shut. She’d always been good at that. At not saying things, not acknowledging what was there. What they both knew.

 

* * *

 

_March 4 th, 2015_

She’d known she’d been attracted to him for a while. But she’d always shoved it down. She knew Jess, loved Jess as the best friend she’d always wanted growing up, the one who took no shit and found the dry humor in any situation. It was easy to see why Wyatt had married her. Hell, Lucy might have married her in another life if she’d had the chance.

She wouldn’t ever hurt Jess. Never.

But she’d been so busy not looking, that it wasn’t until that day that she’d realized that Wyatt was busy not looking right back at her.

They’d run into a little altercation over a painting. The current owner didn’t care all that much that the painting had originally been stolen by Nazis and then sold to the owner’s grandfather. As far as the owner was concerned, it was theirs now, and they weren’t about to give up such a precious family heirloom.

Things had gotten ugly. And by ugly, she meant she’d had a kitchen knife at her throat.

Wyatt had been in front, trying to talk the woman down, but Flynn had crept up from behind and disarmed her. Lucy had sunk to the floor, her legs trembling too much for her to stay standing.

Wyatt ran over to her, taking her face in his hands. “Lucy,” he whispered. “You okay? Luce?”

She’d looked up into his eyes then, and she’d known… it had been right there, _right there_ in his eyes…

God, how she’d wanted to cling to him. To spill it all and say _it’s okay, I know, I love you and it’s okay_ , but she couldn’t.

Stupidly, it hadn’t been until later, until Paris, that she’d realized that she loved Flynn too, that it was both of them that she wanted. In that moment all she’d seen was Wyatt. And all she’d known was that neither of them could ever have what they wanted.

She wouldn’t help him hurt Jess.

 

* * *

 

_September 19 th, 2016_

He’d heard them.

Of course he’d heard them, Lucy had been giggling like—like she was drunk, like she was a kid, like he hadn’t heard her laugh since Paris before she’d inexplicably started crying.

He knew that he shouldn’t look, that he shouldn’t… that it wasn’t his business. He had no claim to her. No right.

Not to either of them.

He cracked open the bedroom door. Maybe Lucy had just gotten drunk again and Flynn was trying to get her up to bed, maybe Flynn needed help.

By the looks of things, help was the last thing that they needed.

Lucy had her arms and legs wrapped around Flynn, who’d pinned her to the wall, and they were kissing each other like the world was going to end.

Wyatt didn’t know whether he was more jealous of Lucy, getting hauled up against the wall and fucking wrecked, or Flynn, who had Lucy wrapped up around him and making those desperate little gasping noises.

His stomach had gone tight and hot and he’d closed the door quickly, quietly. A moment later he’d heard the door to Lucy's room shut, not quite as quietly as Wyatt had managed his.

He could imagine it easily. Too easily.

He’d crawled back into bed and hugged the stupid pillow. He was never going to do anything. He wouldn’t do that to Jess. He had made a promise when he’d married her—and what was more he owed her. He owed her everything.

But it wasn’t until that moment, lying in bed knowing the two people he loved most in the world were perfectly happy without him. Knowing what they were doing with one another, to one another, just one room over. Knowing that he would never truly have either of them.

He’d had to accept it in that moment in a way he never had before: that Lucy and Flynn didn’t want him. That they were going to be happy without him. That the kind of camaraderie they’d developed was going to change. He’d be shut out.

Wyatt hadn’t slept a wink that night.

 

* * *

 

_Present Day_

Lucy insisted on checking them into the hotel room Mason had booked for them. “He used an assumed name and everything,” she told them. “It’s fine. Rufus checked in for us, you just have to go up to the room.”

“No,” Flynn replied, as Wyatt packed up their supplies. “We can’t risk it.”

Lucy pulled out the notes she’d compiled in her latest journal. She saw both Flynn’s and Wyatt’s eyes flick to it.

“You said that Rittenhouse attacked you, and you got the name from the shirts they were wearing—was there anything else that you found out?” Lucy asked, turning the pages to get to the right spot.

“Lucy,” Flynn said, quietly.

She saw Wyatt practically sprain his ankle getting out of the room. She didn’t look Flynn in the eye, just opened up the journal.

“I made notes on what Jess could find—she’s still looking up the history, seeing what she can find—and Jiya—”

Flynn laid his hand over the journal. “Lucy.”

She looked up.

Flynn looked like it was breaking his heart just to look at her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you. That was… it was wrong.”

Lucy shook her head. “I was holding you back. I should’ve… I didn’t understand, Flynn.” She had to say it now, before she lost her nerve. “I didn’t think about what you would use the funds for. I just thought—but of course you’d use it to help relief efforts, of course you wouldn’t keep it for yourself—”

She glanced down at the journal. Flynn had stopped it, open on one of the pages about the Nazi train.

 

* * *

 

_May 10 th, 2016_

She’d been right when she’d told the reporter about the feeling of opening up the train. The moment that Wyatt and Flynn had finished clearing the rubble and Flynn had helped her down from the ledge she’d been sitting on.

It had felt like they’d been in that tunnel for an eternity. It had taken them weeks to find it, and that was after weeks of exhausting searches everywhere else, after weeks of research while Wyatt went stir crazy.

But now they’d done it. They were staring at a train, hidden in a tunnel inside the Alps.

Flynn picked her up by the waist and set her down, his hands lingering. She let them linger, the same way she let Wyatt’s eyes linger. “Care to do the honors?”

She seized hold of the train’s door handle. It had rusted, so it took a few tugs with Wyatt’s help, but she’d gotten it open.

And stepped inside.

The awe that had filled her chest as she’d played her flashlight over the objects in front of her. Literal gold, but also paintings. Tons of artwork. Religious artifacts taken from churches all over Europe. Small statues. Tapestries.

And there, in the corner, carefully stacked—the panels for the Amber Room.

She’d told the reporter all about that part.

But she hadn’t told her about when she’d turned around, and saw Wyatt and Flynn’s faces. How she’d smiled helplessly at them, and they’d smiled back.

That had been the best part.

* * *

 

_Present Day_

Flynn looked down at the journal and saw the entry. “That was one of the best days of my life, you know,” he told her. He looked up, his dark eyes intense, filling her up with thoughts she didn’t dare to say out loud.

“We’d finally found actual treasure for you,” Lucy said.

Flynn shook his head. Lucy thought something inside of her was going to break open. “No,” he said quietly. “No, that wasn’t why—”

“Guys,” Wyatt said, his voice deep and urgent.

They turned… and Lucy saw Rufus standing behind Wyatt in the doorway.

“Rufus?”

“Lucy.” Rufus’s eyes darted between her and Flynn. “You’re lucky I managed to track you down. They showed up at the hotel asking about you. This redhaired woman and a couple of nasty looking guys with her.”

“Shit,” Flynn swore. “That was the woman that was after us.”

“How did they know?” Wyatt asked.

“They must’ve tracked Mason, he funded our expeditions in the past and now he’s funding yours, they must have put some kind of tracker or something so that a false name wasn’t enough to throw them off.”

“They’re going to know I’m with you then,” Rufus said. “I could’ve led them straight to you.”

“You had no other choice, if the reservation was for all four of us they would’ve come after you and then where would you be?” Wyatt asked.

“We have to go,” Flynn said. Wyatt nodded. Flynn looked at her. “Lucy, we have to go now.”

She nodded. “Everything I need’s in my bag.”

“…all my stuff is in my hotel room,” Rufus admitted.

“Welcome to roughing it,” Wyatt said, clapping him on the shoulder.

There were the sound of shouts, and then a car.

“Oh, yeah—they called the police on you,” Rufus added. “Told them you were all defectors or something, I eavesdropped on the call, they used the front desk at the hotel. But according to them you’re now traitors and extremists.”

“What?” Wyatt yelped. “Are you kidding me?”

“Those officers you spoke to,” Flynn said. “They’ll know where we are, they’ll have reported us, they’ll be headed straight for us.”

“I think that’s them now,” Rufus said.

Lucy looked to Flynn and Wyatt.

Flynn looked at Wyatt. Wyatt looked at Flynn. There was a half second of communication between them, silent, but holding an entire conversation inside. Then they nodded.

Wyatt grabbed Rufus and hefted one of the bags over his shoulder. Flynn grabbed Lucy and the bag of guns, tossing one to Wyatt.

Then they both looked at Lucy. Waiting for her command, she realized. The way that they always had.

She nodded. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter's got some good old fashioned action, I promise!


	7. Chapter 7

They hurried out the back door, Lucy carrying the historical documents, Flynn and Wyatt with the weapons, Rufus with a look of despair.

“My clothes are all back there,” he said mournfully.

“Get over it,” Flynn snapped, evidently not in the mood to deal with a civilian. He and Wyatt were doing that thing where they stood apart but with their backs to one another so that they could cover more area, see if someone was coming at them.

“Be nice,” Lucy chastised him. She wasn’t going to let Flynn pull his _I know best so the rest of you shut up_ routine, aka how he dealt with everyone who wasn’t Wyatt or Lucy.

“You’re rather calm about this,” Rufus noted, looking at her.

“Down!” Wyatt yelled.

Lucy ducked instinctively. Rufus took a second longer to register what was being yelled at him, and a bullet whizzed just past his shoulder as he ducked down. He yelped in surprise and fear. Lucy grabbed him. “Careful! Do whatever they say!”

“People are trying to kill us,” Rufus said, as more gunfire sounded around them. Wyatt started to return fire as Flynn grabbed both Lucy and Rufus, yanking them behind some rubble. “People are actually trying to kill us.”

“We know!” Wyatt growled, firing with a gun in each hand because Wyatt liked to pretend he was in the Wild West.

“This is a new experience for me!” Rufus shot back. Lucy had to stifle her grin. Looked like Rufus, at least sass-wise, was going to fit in just fine.

“It happens to me all the time,” Flynn replied idly. He shot Lucy a small, conspiratorial smile.

She refused to return it. Quoting Indiana Jones had been one of the many inside jokes the three of them had back in the day but it was going to take more than that to get Flynn out of the doghouse.

“So this is a typical day for you, huh?” Rufus asked, assessing the situation.

“Better than most,” Flynn acknowledged.

Lucy pulled out some of Flynn’s notes. If they were going to go on the run with people shooting at them then they might as well head for the next location.

Flynn took notes the way that she imagined drunk people played Pictionary. There was supposedly some meaning hidden in all the mess but only the person who’d drawn it knew what that meaning was.

Fortunately, after three years of this bullshit, she’d become pretty fluent in Flynn.

She looked at the papers. Something about it was niggling at her. He’d written down all the locations and the Hebrew and translated it but… something was wrong, something was… off…

“Lucy!” Wyatt grabbed her and all but threw her at Flynn. “Jesus Christ, heft her over your shoulder if you have to, we’re being shot at.”

“Put me down!” Lucy protested as Flynn picked her up.

“Relax,” Flynn told her. “Wyatt, we’re retreating, let’s go, this isn’t the Alamo.”

Wyatt got one more shot off and then turned tail to join them in running.

“Garcia Flynn you put me down right this goddamn second!” Lucy shrieked.

“We just shot at the police,” Rufus said. “We’re going to jail. We’re going to jail and then if we’re lucky we’ll be sent back to the States and we’ll be put in even worse jail and—”

“Stuff it,” Flynn snarled. “Stay quiet, everyone.”

“Where are you going?” Lucy protested as Wyatt shot ahead and led them down an alleyway.

“I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.”

“Well, at least you haven’t forgotten how to show a lady a good time,” Lucy muttered.

Wyatt led them through the back alleys, through the shells of buildings littered with graffiti, through areas that no tourist would dare set foot in. Rufus was silent but Lucy could feel his disapproval.

The sound of running footsteps and gunshots got fainter, until finally Wyatt slowed, and they ducked inside another abandoned building.

“We need a car,” Wyatt said. “And we need to get out of the city fast.”

“Let’s hit up the next temple,” Lucy said. “And Flynn, there’s something wrong with your notes.”

“What are you talking about?” Flynn asked, but he sounded curious. Flynn was never above being corrected by Lucy on history—it was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him.

Wyatt peered out into the street as he reloaded. “The cops will give up once we’re out of the city but Rittenhouse won’t. We need to stay on alert. Rufus, right? You know how to shoot?”

Rufus swallowed. “Um… the characters have guns in _Star Wars Republic Commando_?”

Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Great. Okay. I’ll show you how this is done.”

Lucy pulled out Flynn’s notes. “Look, look at these symbols. I think you translated a couple of these wrong.”

“It wasn’t like I had access to the Israeli scholarly institutions,” Flynn replied.

That gave Lucy pause. “I know someone who does.” She held her hand out. “I’m guessing your phone is satellite?”

Flynn handed it to her and she began punching in Jiya’s number. He was standing way too close to her for comfort. She glared at him until he took a step back. “I can only say I’m sorry so many times.”

It was playing into the game, but she meant it when she said, “Well, say it again.”

“I’m sorry.”

She rolled her eyes in order to hide her smile as she held the phone up to her ear. A moment later, Jiya picked up. “Hey!”

“I need you to hack into some academic institutions for me,” Lucy said. “And you need to be fast.”

“My specialty.”

 

* * *

 

Wyatt put Rufus’s hand in the correct position around the gun. “Okay, so this, means it’s safe. This… means it’s dangerous.”

Rufus nodded.

“Okay, first rule of holding a gun: every gun is loaded.”

Rufus looked at him. “But some guns aren’t loaded.”

Wyatt shook his head. “No. Every gun is loaded. Even when it’s not loaded. It’s loaded. Understand?”

Rufus looked down at the gun, his eyes darkening. “Yeah. Yeah, I understand.”

“Okay. So. When you see something you want to shoot at, you just point it like this…” Wyatt showed him. “And squeeze.”

Lucy was talking with someone on the phone and furiously scribbling all over Flynn’s papers. “See, Flynn, you translated this wrong here… it’s just two symbols but… what? Jiya? Okay, yeah, repeat that, hold on…”

Flynn left Lucy momentarily and walked over. “Just keep your head down,” he told Rufus. “Let Wyatt and I take care of things.”

“Trust me, I’m more than happy to do just that,” Rufus replied. “All I signed up for was a plane ride and soaking in a jacuzzi for a few days.”

“You translated it wrong?” Wyatt hissed, unable to hold in his frustration. “Are you telling me that getting shot at in that temple was for nothing?”

“Obviously it wasn’t for nothing, we now know that Rittenhouse is after us and that they don’t know where the treasure is either, they’re just mooching off of us,” Flynn replied.

“I got it!” Lucy said excitedly. “Jiya, you’re a genius!”

“Got what?” Wyatt said, at the same time that Flynn said it.

Damn, he’d missed watching Lucy work. How her mind moved faster than anyone else’s, how she drew in pieces of history from all over the corners of her mind to form a cohesive whole, an answer to a question that you hadn’t even thought to ask or thought was impossible to answer.

“Look at this symbol here,” Lucy said, standing up and bringing the papers over to them. “This little extra bit… here, that dot, that changes the meaning. It put all of your calculations one degree off, Flynn.”

“Just enough,” Flynn muttered.

“Give me a few hours,” Lucy promised, “And I can figure it all out.”

“Can you figure out at least one location now?” Wyatt suggested. “Then you can figure out the rest there. We’re not safe in Jerusalem, not anymore.”

Lucy bit her lip, looking back down at the pages. “This reference here, to some mountains,” she said. “That could be this one cave system… near where they found the original Dead Sea Scrolls. I could be wrong—”

“You’re never wrong,” Flynn said.

Wyatt agreed, nodding. Lucy’s gut instincts were flawless.

“All right then,” she said, looking from one to the other. She still looked so lost, so hopeful, that Wyatt could feel his heart breaking all over again. “Let’s go.”

Flynn broke into the car but he let Wyatt pick which car, one that would actually properly survive the desert they were going to drive into.

“You can go over the papers on the way,” Wyatt said, helping Lucy into the backseat as Flynn started the car. “And I’m driving.”

“Like hell you are,” Flynn replied.

“You always wreck the damn thing,” Wyatt said, shoving him over to the passenger side. “Only one of us is equipped to race in Daytona and that’s me, so let me drive.”

Flynn put his hands up. He was probably remembering when Wyatt had told him and Lucy about his old man—about how he’d drive Wyatt out into the woods, drive the car, force Wyatt to drive it, just keep going until it was wrecked and then make Wyatt fix it.

It’d been like fire in his lungs, like freedom, driving that car into the lake, even though looking back he knew that he would’ve gone right back to that awful place in time if Jess hadn’t done what she’d done, freed Wyatt of his old man forever.

But then again, maybe Flynn wasn’t thinking about that time at all. That would mean that Flynn cared and Wyatt had plenty of evidence to the contrary.

“You okay back there?” he asked.

Lucy was already pouring over her notes and very pointedly ignoring both men. Rufus was looking around like more gun-wielding maniacs were going to step out of the shadows. “We’re good,” he said, answering on Lucy’s behalf.

Wyatt put the car into gear and got them the hell out of dodge.

 

* * *

 

Lucy was still talking quietly with Jiya in the back as Rufus snoozed, curled up into a ball. Wyatt wasn’t looking too good himself, his eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep and his grip on the wheel making his knuckles stand out.

Flynn looked back. Still no headlights following them.

Lucy’d been muttering with Jiya for the last few hours and it didn’t look as if she was likely to stop any time soon. He felt like an idiot, to have mistranslated and gotten locations wrong, but it wasn’t a huge surprise to him. He’d always done better with Lucy around.

Wyatt shifted a little, moving his head around like he was trying to get a crick out of his neck.

Flynn knew he was probably going to lose a hand for this but he reached over, putting his hand on the back of Wyatt’s neck. Wyatt jerked like someone had tried to burn him.

“Relax,” Flynn muttered. “It’s just me.”

Wyatt shot him a glare but it was way too full of exhaustion to hold any weight.

“When did you get so jumpy?” Flynn asked, digging the pads of his fingers in, trying to get rid of the knots. This was a horrible indulgence, a terrible one, but he wasn’t going to stop unless Wyatt told him to.

“I don’t know, maybe when you got a crazy secret cult or something after us,” Wyatt replied.

“Show a little backbone,” Flynn replied. “It’s just one little cult, after all.”

“And here we always said the only time we’d have people with guns after us was if we went after the Freemason treasure,” Wyatt grumbled.

Flynn smiled. The Freemason treasure, which didn’t exist, but thanks to that damn Nicholas Cage movie everyone thought existed.

Wyatt slowly relaxed under Flynn’s persistence. Flynn would've given his right arm to stop time then, to keep them like this, Wyatt letting Flynn touch him, Lucy safe in the backseat.

“How’s she doing back there?” Wyatt asked, his voice barely audible.

Flynn glanced back. Lucy was starting to slump over, exhaustion finally beginning to hit her. “Looks like her second wind gave out.”

“We’re almost there,” Wyatt promised.

Flynn reluctantly released Wyatt. He reached back and took the phone out of Lucy’s hand as she slumped against the window. “Hey, Jiya?”

“Yeah. Sorry I’m on my fifth Red Bull, who is this?”

“Flynn.”

“Ahhhh.” Jiya’s tone was uncomfortably knowing. “So you’re the, as they say, obtainer of rare antiquities.”

Flynn snorted. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“Is Lucy okay?”

“She’s fine, just passed out.”

“Traitor, I’m on so much caffeine I won’t go to sleep for a week at this rate,” Jiya said. Flynn could hear the tapping of her computer keyboard in the background. “All right. I’ve been scanning all the documents I hacked, they should be in Lucy’s email folder by morning. Morning your time, I mean. Wow, I think I can hear molecules vibrating, is that normal?”

“Do what you can,” Flynn said, knowing that telling her to go to sleep would be useless. “And when you feel your body start crashing, just let it crash. I’m sure whatever you can get to Lucy now will keep us busy for the time being.”

“Thanks, man. You’re a lot more chill than Lucy made you out to be.”

That stung. Flynn swallowed. “I can get intense.”

Jiya snorted. “Yeah, well, didn’t stop her from falling for you.”

It felt like being punched in the throat. “Lucy—”

“Ran halfway around the world the moment you two were in danger,” Jiya said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t do that for anyone, not even my best friend. Maybe my mom.”

“Goodnight, Jiya,” Flynn said. “Enjoy the caffeine hangover.”

It was a little mean to say that and then hang up on her, but he didn’t care.

“What’d she say?” Wyatt asked.

“Nothing,” Flynn replied. “Just that she’s scanning the documents she so kindly hacked into several academic departments to get for us and she’ll be emailing them to Lucy’s account.”

“She said something,” Wyatt said. “You’ve got that look on your face. The one where it’s like you swallowed a lemon.”

“It’s not like you look all that great yourself,” Flynn replied. “You look like an extra from _Night of the Living Dead_.”

Wyatt slowed the car down, going from struggling with consciousness to fully alert. “We’re here.”

Flynn scanned the area, sitting up straighter. No sign of anyone. Just the silent desert and the silent mountains.

“Do we stay in the car?” he asked. Wyatt was good at desert warfare. Flynn was better with cities.

Wyatt shook his head. “Pick a cave, any cave. Likelihood of wild animals is low—besides snakes, make one quote and you’re dead—and we’re sitting ducks in a car.”

They got out, Wyatt shaking Rufus awake and Flynn hauling Lucy up into his arms. Wyatt could carry Lucy but the size difference meant it was a hell of a lot easier if Flynn did it.

Rufus stumbled out of the car, rubbing at his eyes. “I can’t see anything.”

“Your eyes will adjust,” Wyatt said, grabbing Lucy’s notes. “Holy crap,” he said. “Flynn, look at these.”

Flynn walked over, Lucy cradled in his arms with her head on his shoulder. He peered over Wyatt’s shoulder to see a far more accurate—and detailed—list of locations, with several notes scribbled in the margins.

“She did all of that?” Rufus said. “In a few hours?”

“Flynn did the preliminary work,” Wyatt said. Flynn felt a rush of warmth—Wyatt so rarely complimented him.

“Yeah but… this is amazing.” Rufus shook his head, grinning. “No wonder you two fell in love with her.”

And the moment was gone.

Flynn walked quickly towards the mountains, keeping Lucy warm. He didn’t want to be around to see Wyatt’s face.

 

* * *

 

Wyatt felt like he was dead on his feet. He hadn’t been this exhausted since the military. When Flynn said he’d take first watch, Wyatt hadn’t had the strength to fight him on it.

“I’ll take it,” Rufus said instead. “I got to nap. All I have to do is watch, right? I can wake you guys up if there’s trouble.”

Flynn snorted. “Sure, feel free to call Jiya and keep her company, apparently she’s wired on energy drinks and won’t be getting to sleep for a few more days because of it.”

To Wyatt’s utter surprise—and Flynn’s too, he suspected—Rufus grabbed the satellite phone. “Great idea, thanks,” Rufus said, walking off and whistling.

“…why do I feel like we were just played?” Wyatt asked.

Flynn waited for Wyatt to lay his jacket on the ground as a pillow, then put Lucy on top of it. He then draped his leather jacket—the one Wyatt had never seen him without and the one that, frankly, he looked hot as fuck in—over Lucy as a blanket. She didn’t even stir.

“You sleep too,” Flynn said.

At this point, the ground itself seemed like a fantastic bed. Wyatt lay down next to Lucy, draping his arm over her. “You too,” he said. “Gotta keep warm.” The desert got surprisingly cold at night, sometimes all the way down to freezing.

Flynn looked for a moment like he was going to protest, but then he heaved a sigh and got on Lucy’s other side, putting the jacket over her and Wyatt. “I have second watch,” he announced to Rufus.

“Gotcha,” Rufus replied.

Wyatt would have spent a lot more time freaking out about this whole situation if his brain cells were actually awake enough for him to manage that. Huddling for warmth with Lucy and Flynn sounded either like the start of one of his worst nightmares or his best dreams.

But as it was, all his brain could come up with was, _am I really so obvious that Rufus could tell after just meeting me_?

Then he couldn’t come up with anything at all.

 

* * *

 

Lucy woke up feeling warm and comfortable, but in an odd way. She wasn’t on a bed, that was for certain.

She blinked, feeling part of the warm—the part at her back—get up and leave. “Thanks, Rufus,” she heard the warmth—Flynn—mutter.

“Should I huddle too?”

“Yeah, gets freezing out here. Had a nice talk with Jiya?”

“Shut up.”

Warmth returned, but this time she knew it was Rufus. The warmth at her front, that must be Wyatt. They were all taking turns on watch then, wherever they were, and the ones who were sleeping were huddling for warmth.

Made sense.

What didn’t make sense was why she had been dreaming about the Templar treasure.

It had been different than in reality. Odd. In her dream, they hadn’t been finding it in the present day. They’d been finding it back in the day, with actual Templars standing guard like in _Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade_ , the guy with the holy grail. They'd all been staring at her silently. Judging her as she took their treasure.

She couldn’t understand it. Why would her mind be thinking about the Templar treasure? That had been ages ago.

There was something she was missing. There had to be. There was some puzzle piece, and her mind was associating this treasure with the Templar treasure for a reason.

What was she missing?

 

* * *

 

_August 11 th, 2013_

Lucy stood in front of the crumbling door. This was it. This was the entrance.

“Wyatt?” she asked. “Would you like to do the honors?”

Wyatt rolled his eyes fondly, grabbing a crowbar. “It’s not exactly with a flourish or anything,” he told her.

He wedged the crowbar in and put his weight on the opposite end to lever the door open. Flynn caught it as it opened, grabbing a nearby rock to prop it open.

Inside was darkness.

They all turned on their flashlights, Lucy heading in first. She cast the flashlight on the door, pausing when she saw the odd mosaics. “Don’t move.”

Both men froze, just outside the entrance.

Lucy crouched down, feeling carefully along the floor. Yes, that, there… some places had grooves that weren’t filled in by plaster, allowing the plates to move.

She cast her flashlight up along the walls and ceiling. There, up at about five feet along the walls: small holes.

She stayed crouched down and pressed on one of the tiles. It sank down—a pressure plate.

A small arrow fired out of one of the holes. If she’d been standing, it would’ve gone right into her throat.

“Jesus Christ,” Wyatt yelped.

“Show a little backbone,” Flynn murmured. Wyatt glared at him but his cheeks were pink.

“Pressure plates,” she told them. “Another booby trap.” This wasn’t the first they’d discovered. A lot of the Templars hadn’t had time to do anything other than stash the treasure and make a run for it, but others had apparently expected the Church to turn on them and had planned accordingly. The traps weren’t anything too elaborate. Mostly pressure plates like these, a few tripwires, some covered pits.

They all stepped carefully around the mosaics Lucy identified, moving through into the next chamber.

This one had a trip wire. Flynn was tall enough to reach up and disable that one, which when trigged caused an axe to swing out and try to behead the person.

“Nasty,” Wyatt noted.

“They thought they’d earned this,” Flynn replied. “And a powerful, corrupt entity was trying to take it away.”

“They stole it from the Holy Lands,” Lucy reminded him.

“They didn’t see it that way,” Flynn said. “Not saying it’s right. Just saying you have to look at it from their perspective.”

The third and final room had no traps. But it did have the final bits of treasure.

Lucy had done calculations beforehand with the help of various institutions, including the Catholic Church, to figure out just how much wealth the Templars had so that they would know when they’d found most of it. They had identified the various leaders of the Templars, who would have gathered up the treasure and been in charge of dividing it and ordering where it would be hidden. They’d determined that there were fifteen hidden caches.

This was number fifteen.

Her flashlight played over the piles in front of her and she suddenly remembered what Howard Carter had said when he’d found the tomb of King Tut.

“Statues and gold,” she murmured. “Everywhere, the glint of gold.”

She felt Flynn at her side. “I was struck dumb with amazement,” he said in a low voice, continuing the quote. “It was all I could do to get out the words, ‘yes, wonderful things.”

She looked up, and smiled at him, finding him already looking down at her with this warm expression she’d never seen him give to anyone before. It made her breath catch in her throat.

On her other side she felt Wyatt put his hand on her shoulder. “You did it,” he breathed, his eyes wide as he took it all in. “Luce, you did it. You really did it.”

“We did it,” she told him. “I couldn’t have done it without you guys.”

Gold, crosses, statues, jewelry… art and treasure rolled into one, piled up here like it was from a movie set. Gleaming in the glow of their flashlights. Many of them were stamped with the distinctive cross of the Templars. The walls were painted with it was well. Up high in the middle was carved the symbol of the two knights sharing one horse—the reminder of the Templar’s initial poverty.

They’d done it. She’d done it. She’d won the dare—and found one of the greatest treasures of mankind.

In that moment she knew beyond a doubt she was hooked.

 

* * *

 

_Present Day_

Lucy woke up properly a few hours later to Wyatt quietly shaking her. “Hey, Luce,” he said, his voice low and warm. They way she’d always imagined it would be if they’d been together, him waking her up in bed in the mornings. “Breakfast.”

She sat up, rubbing at her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Seven,” Flynn said, handing her a granola bar and some water. “Sorry, it was all that Wyatt and I had packed.”

“I don’t mind.” She looked around. They had holed up in a cave, apparently. “You guys get enough sleep?”

They all nodded. Flynn and Wyatt looked a little worse for wear, but Rufus was chipper. Or, well, as chipper as it was possible to be when bad guys were after your skin.

“We’re in the general area you marked out,” Wyatt said. “We didn’t bother trying to find the right cave, just got into the first one and bunkered down.”

Flynn passed Lucy her notes. “This is impressive, Lucy, even for you.”

“You did the groundwork,” she reminded him. “And Jiya helped out a lot.”

Rufus grinned widely, and Lucy shot him a look. What was he all smiley about?

Wyatt held out his hand. Lucy took his hand and let him help her up, determined not to think too much about it. It was so easy to fall back into those old patterns. She didn’t want to let herself hope…

But on the other hand, Amy had said this could be her chance. Her second opportunity.

Which was the right one? The cautious part of her that said to hold back? Or the part of her that sounded like Amy and told her to take a risk, what did she have to lose?

“So,” Flynn said. “Where’s this cave?”

“It’s going to be the fifth in the row,” Lucy said. “I hope you all wore hiking boots.”

Rufus groaned.

They climbed up in the morning, when the heat wasn’t too bad. The cave entrance was small, and Flynn had to duck down and squeeze to get in. For the first few feet or so it just looked like a small, bare cave, but then Lucy walked right up to the back—and nearly fell down the almost-completely-hidden set of rough stairs.

“Look out!” Wyatt yelled as Flynn grabbed her around the waist, yanking her back.

“Lucky I didn’t sprain an ankle,” Lucy admitted. She didn’t pull away from Flynn’s touch but didn’t linger either.

Her dream still nagged at her. She was missing something.

She turned on her flashlight and started down the steps. Some of the rock crumbled beneath her feet, but it held for the most part. “Careful putting your weight on this!” she called back up to them. “Especially Flynn.”

“You saying I’m fat?” Flynn replied.

“I thought you’d put on a few pounds,” Wyatt teased.

“It’s all muscle, Wyatt, want to see?” Flynn shot back.

Lucy couldn’t see either man’s expressions and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to. She just kept descending.

When she reached the bottom, she saw that this was nothing more than a kind of smaller cave, about six feet high where she stood but rapidly shrinking to four feet, curved in the back.

And it was full of something.

The fabric crumbled as she touched it, carefully moving it out of the way to see what it was wrapped around.

Her flashlight caught on something she’d never thought she’d see like this again: gold.

She pulled more of the fabric aside. Lingots. Lingots of gold, just like the scroll had said.

Lucy felt a rush of dizziness and she had to sit down. This was real. This was all real, the treasure, the treasure that she had literally gone on record in _National Geographic_ to say was most likely fake—it was all real.

Or, most of it, anyway. About half of it was probably already removed by the Romans, the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem, or even the Templars.

The Templars again. Why was that nagging at her?

“Find anything?” Wyatt called down.

Lucy stood up. She still felt a little lightheaded, but she grabbed one of the lingots. It was heavier than it looked—metal always was—but she hugged it close to her chest.

The whole of the Copper Scroll treasure amounted to a value of at least 1.2 billion. If half of that was still around… they were looking at six hundred million in treasure. At least.

She climbed back up the stairs. This was insane. Flynn had been right, there was treasure, and now they had to get to it before these crazy random people did…

Wyatt, Flynn, and Rufus were all standing there looking worried as she emerged. “Everything okay?” Flynn asked.

In response, she held out the lingot.

Rufus choked. “Is that—”

Flynn reached out, carefully taking the lingot from her and inspecting it.

Wyatt helped her up out of the hole.

“Good God,” Rufus managed to get out.

“Yes, that’s what the Hebrews thought,” Flynn mused.

“This isn’t exactly the Ark of the Covenant,” Wyatt snapped.

“No, but it’ll do,” said another voice entirely.

They all turned, Flynn and Wyatt bringing their guns up and simultaneously closing ranks so that Lucy was blocked by their bodies.

A redhaired woman stood in the entrance, smirking at them. She looked beautiful the way Lucy imagined a black widow spider looked beautiful, or a cobra: its beauty simultaneously reminded you of how deadly it was.

Behind her stood about three other people, men, sporting guns. It looked like a stand-off to Lucy. Both sides could fire, and everyone would be dead. Nobody would get out of it.

“I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced,” the woman said. “I’m Emma. Emma Whitmore.”

“Why are you after the treasure,” Lucy demanded. “Nobody even believed it really existed, and you’re clearly tailing Flynn. What’s your story?”

Emma shook her head. “Patience, Dr. Preston. _Veritas vos Liberabit_ , but only at the right time.”

“Archeology isn’t about truth,” Lucy replied. “It’s about facts.”

“All right, you want facts?” Emma shrugged. “Facts are I’ve got more men than you do. Hand it over.”

“Facts are that this belongs to the Israeli government,” Lucy replied. She carefully pulled out Flynn’s phone from his back pocket—easy to hide doing since she was practically entirely covered by him and Wyatt—and surreptitiously dialed Jiya’s number. “This doesn’t belong to you!” she added as the call picked up.

Thank God, Jiya heard her and realized something was wrong, and didn’t say anything. Now Lucy could only hope that Jiya was recording them or tracking their location or something.

“Finder’s keepers, remember?” Emma said.

“As if you’re going to actually report this,” Wyatt pointed out.

“Don’t be stupid,” Emma said. “There’s no way you’re getting out of this alive unless you give me what I want.”

“How do we know that you won’t kill us anyway?” Flynn replied, cocking his gun.

“You think you’re the first greedy assholes we’ve run across in our time?” Wyatt added, cocking his own gun.

“We are nothing like those people,” Emma replied, her voice growing cold. “We don’t do this for ourselves.”

“Oh, I’m sure you donate it all to charity,” Flynn scoffed.

“ _Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam_ ,” Emma replied.

Lucy’s breath froze in her chest.

That phrase. It had been over the door of the Templar tomb. Over most of them, actually, the ones where the Templars had time to plan out the hiding place beforehand.

_Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto your name grant glory!_

These were modern-day Templars.

That was what had been nagging at her—the cross on the shoulders of their outfits, that was the Templar cross. Her subconscious must have recognized it and made the association, that was why she’d dreamed about finding the tomb.

“Stealing from the Holy Land again?” she said. “I guess some people never change.”

Rufus glanced at her. “What does that mean?” he whispered.

“I see your Latin is up to snuff,” Emma said. “Listen, it’s been fun, but my men will shoot unless you—”

“Not if I shoot first,” came Jiya from the phone.

Everyone paused.

“Who…” Emma started, but Jiya spoke again.

“My name’s not important. What is important is that you’re at coordinates 31.752092, longitude 35.309326. And I’ve just managed to hack into an American army missile base. You so much as take a step in Dr. Preston’s direction, and you’re blown sky high.”

“You’ll kill your people too,” Emma pointed out.

“You’ll kill them anyway. At least this way we’re taking you down with us.” There came the sound of typing. “You put us in a no-win situation. I’m just returning the favor.”

“…I think I’m in love,” Rufus muttered.

“You’re bluffing,” Emma said.

“You sure about that?” Jiya replied. “You’re, what, a creepy cult, right? Rittenhouse, that’s what you call yourselves, or at least that’s what you’ve been using for the past fifty years or so, since World War II. You probably will recognize my hacker signature on some of your personal accounts? Should be the signature Lifeboat?”

Emma looked at one of her men, who turned and yelled something at one of the other men who were, presumably, down below.

For a few moments there was nothing but tense silence. Wyatt and Flynn had their guns firmly trained on Emma and her Templars. Rufus looked like he was torn between saying something or just launching himself into the hole behind them.

Lucy couldn’t breathe.

The man returned. “Ma’am. She’s right. We can see her signature ID on some of our files. She got in deep.”

“And left my calling card,” Jiya replied. “I could’ve made myself invisible if I wanted but I figured this might happen so, a little insurance. Now, do you want all of you to die? Or do you want us all to walk away and live another day, huh?”

There was a moment in which it looked like Emma might still give the order to fire.

“If you test me,” Jiya added, “You will fail.”

Another tense moment of silence, and then Emma said, “Stand down.”

Lucy’s breath left her in a whoosh of relief. Neither Wyatt nor Flynn moved.

“This isn’t over,” Emma told them. “There’s more treasure.”

“How did you even find out about this?” Lucy demanded. She needed more answers, she needed to understand, she needed to know—

Emma gave her a smile. It was a cold, slithering kind of smile. Like a snake. “Oh, did I forget to thank you? It was very sweet of you, you know, if ironic. The woman who stole our treasure from us… is the one who printed that very, very detailed article all about another treasure just for us.”

The bottom dropped out of Lucy’s stomach.

The _National Geographic_ article.

“What is she talking about?” Wyatt asked.

“Oh, I’m sure Dr. Preston will fill you in. Bye for now.” Emma winked at them—the goddamn audacity—and then slowly backed out with her men, everyone keeping their guns on each other the entire time.

When two minutes had passed, Flynn walked over to the entrance of the cave. “Clear,” he called back.

Both men put their guns down. Rufus heaved a sigh of relief. “Jiya, you are a miracle worker.”

“Thanks. Especially since I didn’t actually have a missile.”

“What?” Wyatt asked.

“The Army would be all over my shit!” Jiya protested.

“Well, we’ve got a reprieve for now, so who cares how we got it,” Flynn said. “We need to get this gold somewhere safe, fast, and figure out how to beat these idiots.”

Lucy didn’t say anything.

She was the reason that this was happening. She was the reason why everyone was in danger—why the two men that she loved had already nearly died, twice.

This was all her fault.


	8. Chapter 8

Something was wrong with Lucy.

She immediately took off once the coast was clear, the phone still clutched tightly in her hand. She had that oddly shining look in her eye that she only got when she was trying not to cry.

To Flynn’s surprise, Wyatt didn’t do anything about it.

Flynn whacked him in the shoulder. “Are you an even bigger idiot than I thought? Go after her.”

Wyatt stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

Flynn pointed his finger at him. “Do not. Play dumb with me, Logan.”

“Oh, it’s back to last names now, fantastic.”

“You say that as if you ever call me anything except my last name.”

“Am I intruding here?” Rufus asked, his face going from very confused, to worryingly knowing, to slightly terrified all in the span of half a second.

Flynn ignored him, as did Wyatt. “Go after her, you dumbass,” Flynn told him. “Don’t tell me now that you’re divorced you’re going to keep coming up with excuses.”

Wyatt gaped at him. “Are you—are you serious right now? You dick, why haven’t _you_ gone after her?”

“Because I was expecting you to!”

“She doesn’t want me, she wants you!”

“You fucking idiot,” Flynn growled. He couldn’t believe that he was actually having to verbally drive this into Wyatt’s thick, stupidly attractive skull. “The only reason she was ever with me was because she couldn’t have you!”

Wyatt shook his head. “You cannot honestly—that’s what you thought? Is that why you left?”

“No,” Flynn said automatically. “Well. Yes. But no, no, I left because a certain idiotic Texan—”

“Um, guys?” Rufus said, clearing his throat. “Wild, out of the blue suggestion here. Kind of crazy, bear with me a second, but… have either of you thought about actually talking to Lucy about this?”

Flynn turned to stare at him, as did Wyatt.

“Okay,” Rufus said, “It’s really creepy how you two keep doing things in sync, FYI.”

“Talk to Lucy about it,” Wyatt said. “It’s not—look, Rufus, I appreciate the advice but it’s more complicated than that.”

“Because you’re making it complicated,” Rufus shot back. “I can’t believe I’m stuck on the run from a cult and the authorities in the middle of the desert with a bunch of five-year-olds.”

He turned and walked out of the cave, following Lucy’s footsteps.

Wyatt looked at Flynn. “Go,” he said. “It’s all my fault, anyway. I messed it up.”

Flynn shook his head. “Wyatt, you heard us. Lucy and I, we were already… we didn’t see eye to eye and it was getting ugly. You didn’t mess up anything that I wasn’t messing up already.”

Wyatt gave Flynn this absolutely devastated look. “You and I both know exactly what I messed up, Garcia.”

 

* * *

 

Lucy could hardly see the road in front of her with the tears stinging her eyes.

This was all her fault. _This was all her fault._

Mom would’ve been so proud to have her finally published in _National Geographic_ , Lucy knew that she couldn’t possibly say no. They’d told her they wanted an article on fantastical treasures, on the ones that were probably too good to be true.

Lucy had wanted to do something focusing more on artwork, art history perhaps. That was what she was, for crying out loud, she was an art historian at the end of the day. But the magazine had wanted something more sensational.

So she’d written an in-depth article on treasures so sensational they probably weren’t real, and then rated them on a scale of one to ten: one being the least likely to exist, ten being the most likely.

She’d covered the theoretical buried treasure of the Alamo, the one supposedly brought by Davy Crockett and stashed at the fort in order to fund the war, buried during the siege and never discovered.

She’d talked about the supposed Freemason treasure, which everyone thought was a real thing ever since that damn—but very entertaining—movie.

She’d discussed how El Dorado was actually the result of a combination of legends and an exaggeration of an indigenous religious ritual.

She’d focused on Oak Island, a literal treasure pit, where people had died trying to dig up the supposed treasure. God even knew what the treasure was, people said it was everything from the Freemasons to pirate treasure like Captain Kidd or Blackbeard.

And then she’d talked about the Copper Scroll.

She’d given it an eight out of ten and had said that the biggest likelihood was that it had once existed, but had been found and distributed in ancient times, either through the Romans, the Jews themselves, the Templars, or a combination of the three.

That had been the article. That had gotten Rittenhouse’s, Emma Whitmore’s, attention.

Fuck, if she just hadn’t written that article—if she hadn’t been so damn determined to make good on that dare and find the Templar treasure in the first place, if she had kept her nose out of it and just stayed in her little historian bubble…

She never would’ve met Wyatt, though. She never would’ve met Flynn.

Looking at the situation now, she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

She was so tired. She was tired of feeling like she’d never live up to the legacy her mother had left her. Tired of feeling this burden of having to follow up on the Amber Room find, on never being able to top herself, being a one hit wonder. She was tired of loving two men she could never have.

She was just. So tired.

Now the Middle East was getting plundered, again, by some stupid white people with a superiority complex and it was all her fault.

Her phone rang and she jumped. Fumbled. Answered it. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Jiya. I’m going to patch Jess through to you. She said she found something.”

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

On the other end of the line, Jess tapped her fingers against her kitchen table impatiently.

She’d done it. She’d tracked Rittenhouse back through time and she’d found out what they really were.

Templars.

Lucy, Wyatt, Flynn—they were all in incredible danger. Descendants of the original Templars, these people were not going to be happy running into the trio that had taken “their” treasure and given it to museums. Never mind that, you know, the treasure had been stolen from innocent people in the Middle East and was supposed to go back to them anyway.

She had to tell Lucy. She had to warn her. Rittenhouse was going to be out for blood.

Jess didn’t have a phone that could reach Flynn’s, but Jiya said she’d patch her through so the signal would be strong. After a couple of rings, Lucy answered.

“Jess?”

“Oh thank God, are you guys okay?”

 

* * *

 

“…you guys okay?”

Jess was heavily garbled. Lucy could only pick out half of her sentences. “We’re fine!”

“Ritten… dangerous! Not… seem… going to be after you.”

Something about Rittenhouse—well, the dangerous part, Lucy’d already figured out. “Rittenhouse is dangerous, yeah, we know, we just ran into them.”

 

* * *

 

Jess thumped the table in frustration. “Rittenhouse are Templars! Lucy! They’re Templars!”

 

* * *

 

“…are… Lucy! …Templars!”

Lucy heaved a sigh of relief as she understood. Jess had been continuing the historical research, she must’ve found historical evidence of Rittenhouse being descended from the Templars. “We know! They told us!”

 

* * *

 

Jess rolled her eyes. Great, the piece of information she found that was useful and it was already outdated by the time she got a hold of them.

Well, fine, she wasn’t going to waste this opportunity.

“Has Wyatt told you the truth?”

 

* * *

 

“…told… the truth?”

Lucy frowned at the phone. “Um, what?”

 

* * *

 

God dammit. Was this what talking on the phone had been like in the 1920s? “Has Wyatt. Told you. The truth.”

 

* * *

 

“…Wyatt…”

“Wyatt’s fine,” Lucy told her. Of course Jess was worried about Wyatt. Honestly, none of them deserved Jess. “We’re all okay.”

 

* * *

 

Jess sighed. Wyatt was going to kill her for this. “Lucy, listen to me. Whatever he said to you afterwards, he was lying, okay? He was lying. He always loved both of you, that’s the truth, that’s why I divorced him. It wasn’t drunk ramblings, he wasn’t making it up, he loves you both. It’s always been you both.”

 

* * *

 

“Lucy… to me. Whatever… okay? He was… that’s why… him… ramblings… up, he… both. It’s always… both.”

Lucy strained to hear everything. “Jess, what are you talking about? Is this Rittenhouse? Jess?”

“Both!” she heard Jess yell. “Always both! God… fucking… connection… Lucy?”

“I can’t hear you,” she admitted. “Jess, just tell Jiya and then she can tell me, okay? I can’t hear you.”

“…ironic, none of… _hear_ each other… fucking idiots…”

Lucy started to get a very, very odd feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She didn’t think Jess was talking about Rittenhouse.

“Okay, thanks!” she said, because she was a coward. “I appreciate it Jess, I’ll tell Wyatt you said hi, love you too!”

“…Preston! Don’t you… on me! Lucy!”

Lucy hit end on the call.

 

* * *

 

_September 21 st, 2016_

 

She could remember it like it was yesterday. Sometimes she felt like she remembered it better than she remembered the present moment, the things she’d seen, the things they’d all said, more real than what was right in front of her eyes.

It was the evening after that damn _Time_ interview. Wyatt had been oddly quiet after the reporter had left. Lucy hadn’t felt quite right herself. She and Flynn were struggling not to behave any differently around each other now that they’d—well. And she’d felt this odd sense of… things being off-kilter. She didn’t know if it was the sudden attention from everyone, the reporters and interviews, or if it was her and Flynn finally sleeping together, or something with Wyatt and Jessica, him not seeing her for months, or Mom being sick, or some combination of all of it… or something else.

They’d all been sitting at the kitchen table, sipping from their beers silently. It was like some kind of weight had settled around them, swaddling them, and they couldn’t ruin it.

The beers had been pretty piled up in the middle of the table and she was starting to feel like maybe, just maybe, she’d had too much, when Flynn had started asking about that damn pearl galleon again.

It was this galleon that had been swept up into the Mojave Desert, of all places, supposedly loaded with black pearls. People had found it over the years but nobody could ever find it again, and Flynn was determined to find it.

Lucy didn’t agree. They were historians, or at least she was. She was out to recover stolen art, lost relics, not go treasure hunting.

The argument was getting a little heated. And by 'a little', she meant that she and Flynn were both close to shouting, faces inches apart, and saying things they really didn't mean.

Well, she hadn't meant them. She hoped Flynn hadn't, either.

She remembered every stupid word she and Flynn had said to one another in that damn argument.

“You don’t think jewelry isn’t its own form of art?” Flynn snapped.

“I think you’re getting greedy, that’s what I think,” Lucy shot back.

“And I think you’re being a goddamn hypocrite. You don’t think that the Amber Room isn’t treasure? All that Templar shit we found? That’s _treasure_ , Lucy, you don’t get to sit on the high ground and say what is and isn’t worth finding.”

“It’s a bunch of pretty rocks, Flynn! A bunch of pretty rocks that people are going to fight over and squabble over, people with money—”

“It’s finders keepers,” Flynn reminded her, and this—in her memory, when she looked back—this was the part she should’ve paid attention to, but she hadn’t because she’d been angry and hadn’t wanted to hear, hadn’t wanted to think about what Garcia Flynn, survivor of revolutions, widower who’d lost his family in a civilian bomb, Flynn who had seen the ugly side of war and the innocent people who were trapped in it and then had to try to rebuild even though they had never asked for it in the first place, she’d never thought what he might want to do with the money that pearls like that would buy him—

"Never would've pegged you for a selfish opportunist," she shot at him.

"Oh, that's funny, never would've pegged you for being such a hypocrite, either," Flynn snarled in reply.

And then Wyatt had spoken up for the first time that evening.

He’d been beyond drunk and into fully plastered. She’d never seen Wyatt drunk before. He was always so careful with his drink, after his father’s horrific example, but now he was completely smashed.

“Love at first sight,” Wyatt slurred.

Lucy turned and looked at him. “What?”

“She asked, if it was love at first sight,” Wyatt said. His blue eyes bore into hers, and Lucy knew that this was one of those moments where she should look away, but she couldn’t. There’d been so many of those moments of the last few months, more and more of them piling up on each other. She was tired of forcing herself to look away.

“It wasn’t,” Wyatt added, as if it had just occurred to him that he hadn’t said that part out loud. He turned, pointing at Flynn. “I fucking hated you.”

Flynn was sitting very, very still.

“You,” Wyatt said, looking back at Lucy. “I thought you were pretty. Didn’t love you though.”

Lucy knew she had to be breathing, she had to, because she wasn’t dead yet, but it didn’t feel like she was breathing. The very careful equilibrium that they’d all been maintaining was falling apart—Wyatt was chopping it to pieces—and she knew she should stand up, speak up, do something to make it stop but she couldn’t remember how to fucking _breathe_.

“Wyatt,” Flynn said, very quietly, “What are you talking about.”

Wyatt gave a laugh. It was harsh, bitter. “You,” he all but spat. “You with your fucking swagger and your fucking innuendos and your jokes and your goddamn _winking_ —like you’re asking for people to fall in love with you and then you don’t fucking see it when it actually happens right in front of your fucking face.”

A train, she was on a speeding train, they were all on a train speeding into oblivion and she couldn’t make it stop—she couldn’t find the brakes—

Flynn looked like someone had strangled him from the inside out. “Careful, Wyatt,” he said. “You don’t want to say something you can’t take back.”

“Did you say that to Lucy before she asked you to fuck her?” Wyatt asked.

Lucy stood up before she realized she was moving. She’d suspected… but she hadn’t been sure, that Wyatt knew about that.

Wyatt peered up at her. “Yeah, don’t think I didn’t know about that. It’s okay, it’s not like I ever gave you the green light with me.”

Lucy looked from one to the other. Flynn looked like he might hit Wyatt. Wyatt just looked fucking miserable. She didn’t know what to say—how to tell them, _it’s not one of you or the other, you don’t have to compete, I want both, I was just only allowed to have one, I couldn’t betray Jessica, it doesn’t mean I don’t want both—_

“You suggesting I’m her sloppy seconds?” Flynn asked, his voice a dangerously low growl.

Wyatt looked him up and down, a slow, sensuous drag of a look that Lucy had never seen Wyatt give anyone, least of all Flynn. It was the kind of look that set people on fire. “I don’t think you’ve ever been anyone’s sloppy seconds.” He paused, as if considering. “I could probably be yours though. If I really felt like fucking my shit up.”

Flynn looked how Lucy felt: like someone had just taken a fucking sledgehammer to his face. Wyatt laughed again, still bitter, the sound sour in Lucy’s ears. “What, did you really not know?” Wyatt asked, his words drunk-heavy now. “God, fuck, I thought it was so obvious. Lucy knows, don’t you Luce, she knows how I look at her. Fuck, when you made that Shackleton comment in the interview—I thought—you were looking at me and I just thought that you had to know. You must know.”

Wyatt pointed at Lucy but kept looking at Flynn. “If I’m not looking at her,” he said, his voice a dark, ugly whisper, “I’m looking at you. And you never fucking look back, do you? Luce looks back.” He lolled his head back, smiling up at her, a strange Jack o’ Lantern smile. “Don’t you Luce? It’s not cheating if it’s just in our heads, right?”

The bile rose up in her throat before she could stop it. She turned, sprinted, made it to the bathroom just in time.

The vomiting didn’t clear her head, it only made it ring. She washed her mouth out, like that could wash out the extra taste in the back of her throat, the one that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with shame. Fuck, she was never going to be able to look any of them in the eye again, least of all Jess. Jess who was safe at home, waiting, as she always waited, faithfully waiting.

When she came back into the room…

She still didn’t know what had happened while she was gone. Neither of them had ever told her what might have been said, what was done. But she caught the tail end of it. Although they’d tried to pull away when they heard her come in, they weren’t fast enough.

Flynn had his hands in Wyatt’s shirt, angrily, like he was hauling him up to read him his rights or something. Wyatt’s hands were on Flynn’s wrists, gripping for dear life.

They were most definitely kissing. Kissing fiercely, angrily, devouring each other like it was punishment to touch each other like this, like it burned them alive.

Flynn, or maybe it was Wyatt, maybe both, yanked backwards when she entered. Wyatt stumbled but Flynn crossed all the way across the room, kept crossing.

“Garcia—” she started, but she didn’t know how to finish, didn’t know what she was trying to say.

He went up the stairs to the guest bedroom—to sleep, she’d thought.

The angry line of his back was the last thing she saw of him for two years.

Wyatt stayed a little longer. Only because he’d been more drunk than either of them and could barely roll himself out of bed the next morning.

Every time she replayed that scene over in her mind, she tried to think of a way she could’ve changed things. Could’ve made it better. Made Flynn, made both of them, stay.

But her mind was not a time machine and she couldn’t undo what had been done. Not in this life, anyway.

So every time, she helped Wyatt up to bed. Every time, he kept muttering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but whether it was to her or to Flynn or to Jess, she didn’t know.

Every time, right as she was tucking him in and leaving, he’d grab her shirt. “Luce,” he’d slur. “Please, fix it. I broke it and you gotta fix it.”

And every time she said, her voice filled with false calm and cheer, “Of course. It’ll be okay. I’ll fix it.”

And every time she woke up, Flynn would be gone. No note. No nothing.

Wyatt would refuse to say a word. Just pack up his bags. Refuse to even admit that anything had happened. Go back to Jess, saying it was where he belonged. Saying that anything he said last night was a lie. Just drunken ramblings.

Every time she was left alone.

She’d tempted him. Flynn had tempted him. They’d all tempted each other.

So she didn’t write and she didn’t call, she didn’t say anything to either of them.

There.

She fixed it.


	9. Chapter 9

“You guys aren’t going to like the next location,” Lucy said as the men came up to her.

She didn’t seem inclined to say anything about why she’d been on her way to crying, and Wyatt wasn’t about to ask.

He’d been the one to mess things up two years ago. He knew it was on him to make things right. He just didn’t know how.

“Dare I ask why not?” Rufus said.

Lucy held up her journal of notes. “It’s in Jerusalem.”

Wyatt groaned, as did Rufus and Flynn. “We’re going to be slaughtered if we go there,” Rufus said.

“More like arrested,” Flynn replied. “Let’s not get overdramatic.”

The authorities were definitely going to be all over their asses the second they set foot within the city limits. But they had to get to that treasure before Rittenhouse did.

“Maybe we could give the authorities something else to do?” Wyatt suggested.

“A distraction?” Flynn’s eyes were already lighting up with the possibilities.

“No,” Lucy said firmly. Wyatt knew better than to argue with that tone of voice. “We’re not splitting up.”

“What do you want to do with the treasure when you find it?” Rufus asked. “Actually what are we going to do with _this_ treasure,” he added, gesturing towards the cave.

“We give it to the Israeli government,” Lucy said. “This is their land, it belongs to them.”

Rufus looked thoughtful at that. “So, if we’re turning it over to the authorities anyway… and the authorities are going to run us down… what if we just led the authorities…”

“…to the treasure,” Lucy finished. “Rufus, you’re a genius.”

“How are we going to get them there?” Wyatt asked.

Lucy got a devilish glint in her eye. “You still good at street racing?”

 

* * *

 

Lucy braced herself in the backseat. Rufus took one look at her and did the same.

“You buckled in?” Wyatt asked.

“Yup.”

“If the military finds out about this…” Wyatt muttered, throwing the car into gear.

There was no way, they reasoned, that they could get into the city without passing through some checkpoint or another. Not unless they had some not-so-legal friends, and Wyatt’s contacts were about two years out of date. They’d decided instead to make as big of a splash as possible, get the authorities on their tail, lead them to the treasure and then disappear. The authorities were going to be a hell of a lot more interested in ancient gold then some random Americans they could always chase after later.

But it all depended on Wyatt’s driving. He had to keep them ahead enough of the cops that they wouldn’t get surrounded and arrested.

But even if he was shit at emotions—even if all three of them were—Lucy trusted him when it came to this.

"And you are?" the guard asked as they rolled up to the checkpoint.

"Just some tourists," Wyatt said. She heard him hand over his I.D.

There was a pause, and then the guard spoke again. "Sir, I'm going to need you to step out of the car. Your associates as well."

She saw Flynn surreptitiously grip the inside door handle to brace himself. She grinned.

"Nah, I think we're good," she heard Wyatt say.

Then he hit the gas.

Rufus obviously hadn’t braced himself enough because he hit the back of his head with an _oomph_. Lucy could feel the acceleration kicking in, the _whoosh_ in her stomach, and she grinned.

She couldn’t see too much since she and Rufus were hunkered down in the backseat to keep from being seen, but shit was going _down_ if the sirens, the hairpin turns Wyatt was making, and the whooping Flynn was doing were any indication.

“Could you three at least act like you’re not having the time of your lives?” Rufus yelled, clearly terrified and cranky about it.

Lucy grinned at him. “Why would we lie to you like that?”

Wyatt spun the car a little, doing a donut or something, and Rufus looked like he was going to throw up. “Was that really necessary?” he yelled.

“No!” Wyatt called back.

Lucy couldn’t resist, she peeked out through the back window. They were leaving the cops in the _dust_. Adrenaline was pumping through her veins and she thought she might burst out of her skin with the force of it.

“We’re almost there,” Flynn said. He turned and saw Lucy peeking. “God’s sake, Lucy, get down!”

Lucy ducked just as a bullet dinged the side of the car. “Guys coming in on our right!” Flynn yelled.

“I can see them,” Wyatt replied, skidding as he made a sudden sharp left turn.

“Fuck!” Rufus yelled. Lucy grabbed onto Flynn and Wyatt’s shoulders, heaving herself up so that she was in the middle and could see out the front windshield.

“I told you to get down,” Flynn told her.

“No way in hell,” she replied, squeezing their shoulders. She wasn’t missing any more of this.

“You are all insane,” Rufus announced.

Wyatt had this ludicrous grin on his face. “Okay, get ready to bail!”

“Sure we’re not Indiana Jones?” Flynn murmured in her ear. “We got the car chase and everything.”

“This is the stupidest idea ever and I hope you all get sand in your eyes or something,” Rufus grumbled. “No, scratch that, I hope you all step on Legos.”

Wyatt screeched to a halt in front of the area. It was technically a part of a heritage sight, with a gate and everything, but Flynn’s lockpicking skills weren’t about to let that stop them. “Okay, go!” Wyatt yelled, grabbing a shovel from the back.

They dashed out of the car. Flynn knelt down and made short work of the lock, shoving the gate open and making sure the other three were inside before following.

They ran pell-mell down the walkway, past the old crumbling walls of what had once been houses, running just slow enough that the people chasing them could see them in the distance.

“Go left,” Lucy told them. “Left, left, left!”

They turned, hurrying down the steps into one of the buildings. Lucy dug at the floor, nails scraping against the hard dirt.

Wyatt moved her out of the way, stabbed the shovel into the ground, not bothering to be gentle. The historian part of her made a little _nngghh_ sound of pain at the lack of thought, but they didn’t have time to go carefully with little brushes and tools.

Wyatt dug, with Flynn keeping watch. “We’ve got about a minute,” Flynn said, one eye on the gate and another on his stopwatch.

The shovel hit metal.

Rufus and Lucy brushed the dirt away, revealing a thick metal trapdoor.

“Man, these guys weren’t fucking around,” Wyatt noted, setting down the shovel.

Flynn came over and between the four of them they were able to heave it up. Lucy immediately jumped down into the blackness.

“Luce!”

“Lucy!”

“Does she always do that?”

She didn’t get far, it had a set of stairs like the last one. It was another small holding chamber, nothing fancy. She turned on her flashlight.

The glint of gold.

She grinned up at them. “Help me heft a few of these up.”

“Thirty seconds,” Flynn said. “We gotta go.”

Wyatt and Rufus helped her lift some gold up so that the authorities would see it when they got there, and then they were all climbing through the back window.

Or, well, the large hole that served as a window.

They scrambled down the bank, into another street, running as quickly and as quietly as they could. Lucy heard shouts, heard gasps of shock, and more shouting.

“What… are… they saying?” she asked Wyatt, speaking in between gulps of air as she ran.

“They found it,” Wyatt said, his voice quiet but infused with triumph. “They’re babbling about what they have to do next, gotta call it in.”

They ran for a few more blocks and then skidded to a halt. Lucy literally ran smack into Flynn, who steadied her with a hand on her arm, and Rufus actually did throw up a little.

“Do not,” he gasped, bent over, “tell Jiya I did that.”

“Ace driving there,” Flynn said, grinning at Wyatt, that soft, proper grin that he used to have, the one that Lucy had so missed.

Wyatt looked dazed but happy, like he could still feel the car purring underneath him. “I just led a fucking car chase,” he croaked.

Lucy laughed, throwing her arms around him. “Damn right you did, and a brilliant one.”

She didn’t know what she was thinking when she did it. She wasn’t really thinking at all. She just knew that she was wildly happy, that they were behaving like a team again, that Flynn was giving them his soft smile and they’d just led a car chase and turned the gold over to the authorities and barely escaped and she’d missed both Flynn and Wyatt so, so much.

So she kissed him.

She realized what she was doing halfway through the kiss, when Wyatt was still stiff in surprise and not kissing her back. She pulled away, staring at him.

Wyatt looked like she’d stabbed him.

And then Flynn started walking away.

No. No, no, not again, she would be damned if she let that fucker just walk away from her one more time.

“Flynn!”

She tore after him, leaving a confused Rufus and a stunned, frozen Wyatt behind her.

 

* * *

 

Lucy tore after him. “Flynn!”

He could hear her, but he didn’t stop.

He wasn’t doing this again. He wasn’t going to be a part of whatever mess was going to be made out of this. He wasn’t—

Lucy grabbed his arm and spun him around. Her face was screwed up in anger. “Don’t you dare,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare walk out on me again, Garcia Flynn.”

He tried to shake her hand off but she dug her nails in. “You can have him now,” he told her. “He’s divorced. You can—”

Lucy grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him forward, kissing him. It wasn’t a particularly sweet or gentle kiss, either, her tongue sliding into his mouth like she owned him, her lips pressing against his like she was trying to bruise him. Flynn hadn’t ever felt so goddamn _claimed_ in his life.

He couldn’t help but kiss her back, so goddamn in love with her still. Lucy made a feral, pleased noise and pressed herself up against him, taking his face in her hands to keep him in place like he was thinking of running.

Although he couldn’t blame her for thinking that he might.

They pulled back, gasping, but Lucy wouldn’t let him go far, tightening her hold. “I was always in love with both of you,” Lucy told him—or growled at him, rather. He had always known she was authoritative but this was a whole new level and he was kind of (definitely) into it. “I wasn’t ever trying to turn you two against each other. I just—” Her expression and voice gentled. “It’s always been the both of you, equally.”

Flynn sighed. He could feel all of the hope that he’d just had leaking out of him. “Lucy, I can’t.”

“But you—you and Wyatt, you kissed, I saw—”

“It’s not about me, or you.” He took her gently by the shoulders. “I’m not going to be a part of Wyatt’s self-loathing.”

Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “What happened between you two, while I was in the bathroom.”

 _While you were throwing up_ , Flynn thought. He’d thought she’d been upset at what was happening, disgusted even, and that was why she’d vomited.

“Let’s just say his small-town roots reared their ugly heads,” Flynn admitted. “And I sort of lost it a little.”

He’d kissed him, because he was tired of holding himself back, and tired of hearing the way Wyatt talked about wanting him—like being attracted to another man was a curse. And Flynn just couldn’t take it anymore because dammit, not being with someone because you were married, he understood that, but because you thought it was sinful? Twisted?

Hell no.

He could still taste Wyatt on his tongue, the same way he could still feel Lucy in his arms. Like imprints, ghosts that lurked under his skin. Wyatt had kissed him like Flynn was salvation and damnation all wrapped up into one and Flynn had tried to kiss the hell out of him, to make it the best damn kiss Wyatt had ever gotten, to prove to him that this was good, was right, could be damn amazing.

Flynn forced himself to be in the present moment. “I was wrong to just abandon you. I thought—I thought that you only wanted me because you couldn’t have Wyatt, and I knew Wyatt was going to hate himself and us in the morning, and so I thought the best thing to do was just to remove myself from the equation. Then when I called Wyatt and he told me that he and Jess were divorced but he wasn’t with you… I started to think maybe I had gotten it wrong.

“But I am not going to deal with him denying this. I’m not going to fight through that. If he’s not on board then I’m not on board. I can’t do that.”

Lucy looked a bit like she might cry, but then she drew herself up. She’d always been the strongest of them. “What if I talk to him about it?”

Flynn raised his eyebrows. “And you don’t think that’ll cause a freak out?”

“What do either of us have to lose, really, at this point?” she asked.

Nothing, really, that was true. Nothing could be worse than the awkward dance they were all doing around each other now.

“If you think it’ll help, then fine. Talk to him.”

Lucy smiled, genuinely smiled, and he just had to kiss her. Now that he knew how she felt, he didn’t think he’d ever stop touching her unless she told him to.

“Let me handle this,” she whispered against his mouth. “Okay?”

Flynn nodded. Okay.

 

* * *

 

Lucy took a deep breath, trying to keep herself calm. The best way to approach Wyatt about something was to basically back him into a corner—literally—so that he had to talk about that thing whether he liked it or not.

Someday, she thought, they really needed to get him to a proper therapist.

But until then, cornering Wyatt was the best way to talk to him, so corner him she did when they got to the next treasure site.

Rufus seemed torn between being excited and being terrified as they approached the entrance to the catacombs. “Are these going to be booby trapped?”

Lucy shook her head. “No. Believe it or not these graves were above ground when they were constructed. Time buried them. And why would anyone booby trap a grave?”

“The Egyptians did.”

“That’s a myth, Rufus. Nobody booby trapped anything. In fact, Egypt’s got a long history of grave robbing, so they probably should’ve laid some traps.”

They entered the series of sunken tombs, turning on their flashlights.

“I still say this is creepy,” Rufus whispered.

Flynn forged ahead while Wyatt took the rear. Lucy fell back so that she was closer to Wyatt.

“I had a real interesting conversation with Jess earlier.”

She could feel Wyatt start to panic. “Oh?”

“She told me something—it was really staticky over the line but what I could make out was pretty interesting.”

Then Flynn stopped dead in his tracks ahead of them.

“Your persistence surprises even me, Flynn,” Emma said. “You’re going to give mercenaries a bad name.”

Lucy grit her teeth and strode forward, stopping only when both Flynn and Wyatt tugged at her so she couldn’t get all the way over and punch Emma in her smug face. “What the hell do you hope to gain from this?” Lucy snapped. She barely recognized her own voice with the rage coursing through it. “Your organization died out years ago. You’ll never have your power back.”

“That’s what you think,” Emma replied. She had more of those goons with her, standing behind her. Waiting. “We haven’t forgotten those few years of power. Kings bowed to us. Entire countries. We protected them from the invaders and we fought with God on our side and they knew it. We had it all.”

“You were greedy egomaniacs who attacked people that would’ve otherwise left you alone,” Lucy hissed, trying to tug out of Wyatt and Flynn’s grip so she could get to Emma.

“And that justified what the Church did to us?” Emma demanded, her eyes blazing. “They burned us _alive_.”

“Apparently they didn’t burn enough of you,” Lucy said. She barely knew where this rage was coming from. Maybe it was a long time building. But fuck’s sake, she was not going to let a bunch of entitled pricks with a kink for world domination best her. “This treasure is just a means to an end. What do you really want?”

Emma smiled. “Now that would be telling.”

“Power,” Rufus blurted out.

Everyone looked at him.

Rufus shrugged. “Jiya and I were talking about it last night. With all the research she was doing. And what else do crazy white supremacist fringe groups want? You want the power back that was stolen from you.”

“We can’t help it if the rest of the world lost its way,” Emma replied.

There was movement out of the corner of her eye and Lucy turned. Wyatt was faster, being in the rear, and he brought his gun up just as two more goons stepped out from behind them.

They were surrounded.

“Now, be a good girl,” Emma said, smirking. “Help us out, and tell us where all the locations are. Our historian’s being a little… slow.”

“Why not just kill us?” Lucy asked. “Why give us a chance to help you?”

“Where else will we find someone so gifted? So knowledgeable about history? Someone who is truly on our intellectual level?”

“Try the local sewer,” Lucy spat.

Flynn’s chest shook as he held in his snort of laughter.

Emma’s eyes narrowed. “Your impertinence is going to cost you.”

“I’m not joining your little…” Lucy rolled her eyes. “Society. Book club. Whatever you want to call it.”

“But don’t you want to?” Emma asked. She took a small step forward and Flynn raised his gun in warning.

“Wow, there sure are a lot of guns up and loaded and pointed at squishy parts,” Rufus noted.

“Face it, Lucy, you’ve always been the best in your field. A genius. You’ve found things that people said were hopelessly lost, things nobody else could find. Don’t tell me that’s not something special.” Emma almost, but not quite, smiled. “Imagine what would happen if you turned your mind to fixing the world’s problems. The patterns you could find. The mountains you could move.

“The rest of the world… it needs a guiding hand. That’s what we’re here for. And who better to figure out how then a historian? Someone who knows the patterns of history? You could stop finding that silly treasure.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Flynn growled.

“I know you struggle with it,” Emma said. “With feeling just like a treasure hunter. You’re not after shiny coins, are you? You want to be remembered for your art finds, for your history knowledge. You want to be _more_. This will be your chance. But it’s up to you. Your choice.”

Behind her, Wyatt snorted derisively. “Yeah, you know what we call it in the army when someone points a gun at you and says you have a choice?”

Emma glared at him, but even without Wyatt’s remark, Lucy’s mind was already made up.

“I don’t know what you’ve been snorting, but the whole controlling the world business? Never works out. Ask any Bond villain.” Lucy finally was able to wrench her arm away from the boys. “Now get the hell away from us, or we’ll make you regret it.”

Emma’s face when kind of still, and then she tilted her head a little, almost like her version of a shrug. “Oh well. Worth a shot.”

Then everyone started firing.

Someone—either Wyatt or Flynn, she wasn’t sure—shoved her down so that she was on the ground. Lucy twisted, trying to see what was happening. Rufus actually managed to get a shot off, hitting a guy in the stomach, and he stared down at his own hands in half pride, half horror.

Flynn and Wyatt were firing, but she noticed that they weren’t aiming to kill but to incapacitate—leg or arm shots instead of going for the head or torso. Flynn kept aiming at Emma but his shots would go just above or to the side of her head. Either like Emma was exceptionally good at dodging, or Flynn’s shooting had gotten rusty the last two years, or…

Lucy saw Emma aim for her and rolled, the bullet striking the ground. No power, no amount of riches, was worth this. How could anyone be so greedy, so hungry for it?

She scrambled to her feet. “Emma, this isn’t worth it!” she yelled. “Just give up!”

Emma’s eyes burned. “You _child_ ,” she hissed. “You have no idea—”

Her gun went up, aiming square for Lucy, but then a set of hands was grabbing her, shoving her behind them.

Oddly enough, she recognized the smell of him before anything else. Flynn had always smelled like leather to her, but Wyatt smelled like soft fabric, like fresh laundry.

That was what she smelled, and then she saw Emma’s finger squeeze the trigger, and Wyatt was shielding her—

Wyatt went down.

Flynn fired.

The bullet struck Emma right in the forehead. She went down. Eyes open. Staring into nothing.

He hadn’t even had a second of hesitation. Wyatt had been shot and Flynn had just…

It was odd, Lucy thought. The bullet wound was very small. It fit right between Emma’s eyes.

It was possible that she was experiencing a slight bit of shock.

She looked at Flynn, her head moving as if stuck in molasses. “You killed her.”

He could’ve killed her this whole time, she realized. All those shots he’d fired had missed on purpose. They’d been warning shots. He’d been holding himself back.

Flynn already had his hands on Wyatt’s chest, pressing against the wound, trying to stop the blood that seeped out from between his fingers. Wyatt’s eyes were closed and his face was already oddly pale. Flynn looked her in the eyes. “You’re damn right I did.”


	10. Chapter 10

They carried him out of the catacombs, past the other dead bodies. What was going to happen to them, Flynn neither knew nor cared.

Rufus found them a car, calling Jiya for instructions on how to hotwire it.

“We need to get him to a hospital,” Lucy said, her fingers fluttering around Wyatt’s sweat-streaked face, petting his hair.

He’d gotten delirious real quick. Flynn had seen this happen before. Seen it happen too many times. Had too many friends die in his arms.

He wasn’t going to lose Wyatt.

“We can’t,” he told her, carefully helping Rufus to load Wyatt into the backseat. “They’ll arrest us and quarantine him. It’ll be weeks before we all see each other again. And I doubt that was the only faction of Rittenhouse.”

It was pretty damn clear that neither Flynn nor Lucy was leaving Wyatt for even a second, so Rufus got into the driver’s seat. “I’m not exactly from _Fast and Furious_ ,” he said, “but I am a pilot. Where are we going?”

Flynn started pulling out his first aid kit, taking the scissors first to cut the fabric away from Wyatt’s chest. Shit, shit, that wound did not look good.

“Hey,” Lucy was saying, Wyatt’s head in her lap. “Hey, Wyatt, I need you to stay with me okay? Stay with me, stay awake.”

“The cave,” Flynn said. “Where we were before.” It was just far enough out of the city to keep them away from the authorities and other prying eyes but not so far that Wyatt would—that things would get complicated before they got there.

Rufus put the car into gear, accelerating as smoothly and gently as he could. The car still rocked a bit and Wyatt moaned.

Flynn grit his teeth. “Rufus, I’m going to need you to drop us at the cave, then go back out and get more supplies.”

“You realize I could be arrested.”

“You realize he could die?” Lucy shot back, her face streaked with tears. “Sorry, sorry,” she mumbled after, wiping at her face.

Flynn yanked off his jacket, then his shirt. It was dusty and sweaty, but it was better than nothing. He handed it to Lucy. “Start tearing this into strips.”

He grabbed one of the water bottles and then the remains of Wyatt’s shirt. “This is gonna hurt,” he warned, even though Wyatt couldn’t understand him.

The water hit the wound and Wyatt screamed out in pain. Lucy gave a little sob and cradled his head, grabbing one of his hands and holding it when Wyatt instinctively tried to shove Flynn away. “It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay it’s me, it’s me and Flynn, we’ve got you, it’s okay sweetheart…”

Flynn mopped up the blood and water as best he could with the shirt, until it was clean, then grabbed the small bottle of vodka he kept in the first aid kid.

His first aid kit was a little more extreme than most.

He looked at Lucy. “You’re going to want to pin him down.”

Lucy grabbed Wyatt’s wrists and wrapped his arms around her, then bent over his head, pressing her hands onto his upper chest. She nodded.

Flynn started pouring the vodka over the wound, disinfecting it.

The sound that Wyatt made was one that Flynn had unfortunately heard before. He hadn’t realized how much worse it would sound when it was coming out of someone you were in love with.

Lucy was pressing her hands down, her body shaking with the effort of keeping Wyatt’s body pinned as he writhed in pain. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’m so sorry, but it’s to make you better, I promise, Wyatt, just listen to my voice okay? We’re patching you up.”

“Chest wound,” Flynn said, examining it. “Definitely going to have to take the bullet out.”

Contrary to popular belief, a bullet didn’t always need to be removed. Sometimes trying to remove it actually caused more damage. But not in this case. Not when the bullet had lodged where it did.

Rufus was accelerating even faster, as if sensing that time was running out and that by driving faster he could beat the clock. “I’ll get us there,” he promised.

Wyatt started whispering something. Flynn couldn’t make it out at first, but then Lucy sat up a little more so that Wyatt’s mouth was no longer muffled in her stomach and he could hear him.

“Jess,” Wyatt was whispering. “Jess, Jess, Jess…”

“It’s me,” Lucy said. “It’s Lucy, Jess isn’t here.”

“I’m so sorry,” Wyatt croaked. “Jess, I’m so sorry. You always took care of me and I—I never—am I gonna die? Am I gonna die?”

Fuck, it felt like Flynn’s heart was ripping itself out of its chest. Tears were making little rivers down Lucy’s face. She shook her head. “No, sweetheart, no. You’re not gonna die. I promise.”

“Drive a little faster, Rufus,” Flynn ordered. He couldn’t remove the bullet while the car was moving. It was way too risky.

“I’m at top speed!” Rufus shot back, his voice shaking.

“I’m sorry,” Wyatt repeated. “Jess, I’m sorry, I should’ve taken care of you like you took care of me. But you gotta tell ‘em, you gotta—you gotta tell ‘em Jess.”

“I’ll tell them,” Lucy promised, giving up on trying to convince Wyatt that she wasn’t his ex-wife. “What do you want me to tell them?”

“You know,” Wyatt whispered. “You gotta forgive me, Jess, I’m so sorry, but you gotta tell ‘em I meant it. I meant everything, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry I wasn’t loyal to you and I’m sorry I walked out on them and I lied, oh God fuck I lied to Lucy right to her face, I told her I didn’t mean any of it but I did, you gotta tell her I love her, okay? I love her—and Flynn, you gotta—you gotta find Flynn and tell him I’m sorry and I love him and I need you to please, please Jess, please tell ‘em—”

“I’ll tell them,” Lucy promised, petting Wyatt’s face, trying so hard to keep her voice steady, the way she always tried so hard to keep steady while everyone else got to fall apart. “I promise.”

Wyatt stared up at her, eyes glazed with pain and fever…

And then he passed out.

“Fuck, keep him awake!” Flynn yelled.

“We’re here!” Rufus said, slowing down to a stop.

They carried Wyatt into the cave, laying down everything they had. “Call Jiya, ask her to look up what to get and where,” Flynn ordered.

Lucy took up position by Wyatt’s head again, holding down his arms.

“Good girl.” Wyatt could wake up at any moment and start thrashing.

Flynn grabbed his supplies and took a deep breath.

He’d done this before, he could do it again. He wasn’t going to let someone else he loved die.

He hadn’t been there for Lorena and Iris. He’d told them to stay put, told them to go to the other side of the city, the fighting wasn’t over there. He told them they’d be safe.

Then he’d come back from his mission to find their building collapsed and in flames.

He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t been able to save them.

But he was here now. He could do this.

Wyatt woke up yelling as Flynn dug the bullet out. He wasn’t even making sense anymore, babbling random words and snatches of phrases. Lucy held him down, using her entire five foot five inch body as leverage. Flynn disinfected the wound again, then grabbed the supplies for stitching.

Please, dear God, please let him have disinfected enough. Please let there not be an open organ or something he didn’t see. Please let him find all the internal bleeding. Please…

First time he’d prayed in, what, six years? And of course it was while stitching up a goddamn bullet wound.

Lucy kept murmuring praise and comfort to Wyatt, clearly hoping her soothing voice would at least get through to him if nothing else. Flynn nodded at her encouragingly as he worked. He kept his movements fast and sure, refused to let himself second-guess. He’d done this a dozen times before. Doctors weren’t always available in the kind of armies he’d fought in. He just had to trust his instincts and not let his fear make him overthink and hesitate. That way lay bleeding out—hesitation was death.

He didn’t know how long it took, cleaning and stitching and disinfecting and doing it all over again. Time seemed to blur, everything except the wound under his fingers becoming fantastical, dreamlike. He even tuned out Lucy’s murmurings eventually.

His hands got slick with blood. Everything was blood, everything was red.

Wyatt’s screams slowly died down to pained grunts and groans. Lucy’s grip relaxed and she began to pet his hair. At some point she took off her shirt, practical sports bra underneath, and used it to mop up the sweat pouring down Wyatt’s head and neck.

Then it was done.

It was done.

Flynn sat back. Looked at the closed wound. Tried not to look at his hands. His hands, stained with Wyatt’s blood.

“You did so well,” Lucy whispered, kissing Wyatt’s temple. “You did so good, sweetheart, it’s all over now.”

“We need to keep watch,” Flynn croaked. He had no idea when his throat had gotten so dry. “Make sure the fever breaks. Keep him drinking lots of fluids.”

Lucy nodded at him. “Hey, c’mere.”

Flynn leaned in, let her press their foreheads together. Breathed with her, breathed her in.

“You did it,” she whispered. “He’s okay. You did it.”

“He’s gonna need a checkup,” Flynn admitted hoarsely. “Once we’re no longer wanted criminals.”

Lucy nodded, the movement making her nose bump against Flynn’s. “Do you think…” she took in a shuddering breath. “Do you think that he meant it?”

Flynn pulled back. “He was delirious, Lucy.”

“He thought he was going to die.” Lucy was crying again. “He thought he was going to die and that was what he wanted to make sure we knew. That he loves us. Not past tense either.”

There was such a war between fear and hope in her eyes that Flynn could feel his heart clench in empathy. “I’m withholding judgment until we hear it from him when he’s not drunk, or delirious, or thinking he’s going to die, but when he’s sober and in his right mind and not in a position to claim he can take it back.”

Lucy nodded, then looked down at the unconscious Wyatt and sighed. “We never seem to get a break, do we?”

Flynn’s breath caught a little at the reference. “Does this mean we’re forgiven?”

Lucy looked up at him, tilting her head as if in thought. “I suppose so,” she said.

Then she leaned in and kissed him.

There wasn’t even enough time for him to react—by the time he got his brain online, she was already pulling away and settling Wyatt’s head more firmly in her lap. Flynn’s shirt was now serving as Wyatt’s makeshift bandages. His face was still too pale for Flynn’s liking and his breaths were labored, but his pulse was steady when Flynn put two fingers to Wyatt’s wrist.

Lucy gave an odd little giggle.

“What?”

She gestured at herself, at Flynn, and then at Wyatt. “First time all three of us get shirtless together and it’s not even remotely how I’d imagined.”

Flynn choked, half laughing, half crying, half—he didn’t even know anymore. The adrenaline was starting to wear off and he was feeling that odd, levitating kind of sensation that came when not just his head but his entire body felt too light.

“Whoa,” Lucy said, grabbing him just as the world started to tilt. “Hold on, Flynn, you’ve literally got a foot of height on me, please don’t pass out.”

“Sorry.” He braced his hand on the dirt and then slumped to the ground. “Fuck. Fuck, we didn’t even have anesthesia.”

“Trust me, I noticed,” Lucy replied. She pressed a bottle of water to his lips. “Drink this.”

Flynn obeyed her orders, downing the entire thing. “Lucy?”

“Yes?”

“You wouldn’t mind if I just…”

He was out like a light.

 

* * *

 

Lucy did her best to keep both men as comfortable as possible. She’d seen the way that Flynn had gone from in the zone, eyes fixated only on Wyatt’s wound and the stitches he was weaving, to pale and drawn, his body suddenly seeming ten pounds thinner and ten years older.

When he’d passed out on her, she hadn’t exactly been surprised.

Now that Wyatt was still out and Flynn was down for the count, she gave herself over and cried until her entire body was shaking.

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. They’d never been in that much danger before. Never gotten that close to death before. She’d held Wyatt in her _arms_ , she’d felt the blood and the life leaving him, she’d felt the fever in his skin and the odd coldness in his limbs.

She’d nearly lost him.

And Flynn, God, Flynn, shoving every single fear she could see lurking in his eyes out of the way and literally digging a bullet out of Wyatt, then stitching him up—from the inside out. And he’d done it all while probably panicking inside. At least she’d been allowed to cry while patching Wyatt up. Flynn hadn’t even had that luxury.

And he’d done it. He’d done it, he’d saved him.

There were the sound of footsteps. Lucy grabbed Flynn’s gun out of his hip holster, yanking it up and pointing it at the cave entrance.

Rufus emerged, took one look at the gun, and almost dropped everything he was carrying. “Whoa, Jesus, Lucy!”

“What?” came Jiya’s voice over the phone. She was on speaker, the phone perched on top of the pile of supplies Rufus had.

“Nothing, just Lucy pointing a gun at me,” Rufus said sarcastically.

“I didn’t know who you were!” Lucy said, putting the gun back in the hip holster.

“Yeah, I can’t blame her,” Jiya said.

“Traitor,” Rufus replied playfully.

Jiya laughed.

“All right,” Lucy said, waving Rufus over. “You two can go back to your weird flirtations once we sort this out.”

Rufus made a sort of strangled squawking noise.

Lucy sorted through the supplies. Proper bandages for Wyatt, painkillers for Wyatt, sports drinks—also for Wyatt, to replace his electrolytes—bottles of water, more alcohol (for Wyatt, ostensibly, but she was pretty sure the rest of them would be cracking into that too), a camping pillow, and more.

She settled the pillow under Wyatt’s head, then rolled her eyes as Rufus stood clutching the phone hopefully. “He’s fine, off you go.”

Rufus gave her a salute and then went outside the cave to keep talking with Jiya.

Lucy sighed, grabbing the washcloth that had been with the supplies, soaking it, and then laying it over Wyatt’s forehead.

Wyatt’s eyes slowly blinked open.

“Hey, sweetheart.” She didn’t care if he objected to the endearment or not, she’d fucking earned the right to use it. “Drink some water, ‘kay?”

He obeyed, probably more out of habit than anything else. “Luce?” He croaked when he was finished.

“Yeah, it’s me. I’m right here.”

“Garcia?”

Wyatt rarely called Flynn by his first name. Lucy swallowed down the lump in her throat. “He’s here too. Sleeping.”

“Emma.” Wyatt’s eyes searched her body. “She was—”

He was looking for bullet wounds, Lucy realized. “Flynn killed her. She’s gone.”

She still couldn’t quite process that. Flynn acting as executioner without hesitation. One shot, fired immediately. The rage in it, the swift decision of it. Like he’d laid down a line in the sand and Emma had crossed it when she’d hurt Wyatt.

Although Lucy knew without a doubt that if she’d been the one hit, Flynn would have done the same.

Wyatt’s eyes slid closed for a moment, but then he opened them determinedly. “You were gonna talk to me,” he whispered. “Before the fight.”

It sounded like he didn’t remember all the things he’d confessed while delirious. Maybe Flynn had been right to hold back on the celebration. “Yeah. Jess told me, Wyatt. That you remembered. That you were in love with us both. That you meant it all.”

Wyatt blinked slowly. For a moment it looked as though he might try to deny it still. But then he whispered, “Yes.”

Lucy felt tears pricking her eyes again and wiped at them furiously. “Then why did you lie?”

“Why didn’t you fix it?”

Lucy stared at him. “What?”

“I asked you.” Wyatt’s voice cracked and he drank some more water, then tried again. “I begged you to fix it. But you didn’t. You just let me go. You never went after Flynn, you never went after me. I thought that meant—that I’d messed it up too much to ever fix it. Or that you didn’t really want both of us. That I was the only one who wanted it that way.”

“I thought you were just confused,” Lucy said. “You were denying it all and I thought… well you’d never been that drunk before. I couldn’t say for certain which Wyatt was telling the truth, drunk Wyatt or sober Wyatt. I thought… I thought that leaving you both alone was fixing it. That Flynn could go after the treasure he wanted and you could go back to Jess like you wanted.”

“I wanted a reason to stay,” Wyatt admitted. “I wanted someone to tell me it was okay to want this. I wanted you both to say you loved me back.”

“We do love you,” Lucy said. She rubbed at his chest, careful to avoid the bandage. “We’ve always loved you.”

“You can’t speak for Flynn.”

Lucy sighed. Were they really going to keep making this difficult? “Fine, I don’t speak for Flynn. But I speak for myself, okay? I’ve—I hated myself for it. I hated that I was in love with a married man. I love Jess, she was my best friend. She still kind of is. I hated that, even if we weren’t doing anything in real life, in my head I wanted, I imagined…

“And I hated that even after you and Flynn left and I thought neither of you ever wanted to see me again that I still loved you both. That I couldn’t move on. I tried dating this one guy, Noah, and he was really sweet but… my heart just wasn’t in it. I couldn’t even go on a fucking expedition.”

She cupped his face in her hands. “And now I’ve been given a second chance. And I’m not letting either of you two, or myself, screw that up. Because maybe I couldn’t move on because I wasn’t supposed to.”

Wyatt reached up, careful of his wound, and brushed his fingers over her cheek. “You’re so much better than we deserve,” he whispered. “Sometimes I don’t know if you’re real.”

She caught his fingers, pressed her lips to his knuckles. Squeezed as tightly as she dared. “Then I guess you two are just gonna have to spend the rest of your lives trying to deserve me, aren’t you?”

Wyatt chuckled, but she could hear the weariness in it. “You know, that was our first.”

“What was?”

“You kissed me,” he said. His eyes were falling closed. “After the car chase. Our first kiss.”

“Not a very good one, I think you were in shock.”

“Then we’ll just need to do a better one.”

She leaned down and very softly pressed her lips to his. “How’s that?” she whispered. “Better?”

“Mm, perfect,” Wyatt mumbled, his mouth barely moving. “You’re perfect.”

“Sleep,” she told him. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

He half-nodded, already slipping into slumber.

She didn’t stop holding his hand.

 

* * *

 

When Flynn woke up, they had to go back to the catacombs.

“There’s a shit ton of silver and several dead bodies,” Lucy told Rufus when he seemed inclined to grumble.

“And those can’t wait a day?” Rufus replied.

Flynn rolled his eyes, glancing down at his hands and then trying to pretend that he hadn’t.

He’d scrubbed for what felt like hours until all the blood was gone. But he still saw it, or thought he saw it, out of the corner of his eye. Was so certain that if he glanced down, he’d see it back on his hands.

Wyatt was all right, drinking what he needed to and taking painkillers, but mostly sleeping. Rufus had been instructed in how to watch over him.

“We’ll be back in just a short bit,” Lucy said. She was taking this whole ‘get the treasure and stash the bodies’ thing in stride. “Just make sure he’s getting his nutrients.”

“And that his bandage is changed,” Flynn added.

“And watch his painkiller dosage.”

“And keep him comfortable.”

“And—”

“Okay, okay!” Rufus said, holding his hands up. “I get it, you two are the most helicopter boyfriend and girlfriend ever. He’ll be fine.”

Lucy huffed, but there was nothing else for it. They had to take care of this, and quickly before the authorities found the bodies.

The drive over was silent.

Flynn wasn’t sure what to say. He hadn’t been thinking about it at all in the moment. One second Emma was firing, either about to hit Lucy or Wyatt—and he was raising his gun, finally aiming to kill.

He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t do that. That he wouldn’t be that way in front of Lucy and Wyatt. He didn’t want them to see the dark stains that still clung to his soul.

But when Wyatt had been hit, he’d lost all rational thought. The only thing in his head was _kill_.

So he had.

Then it had been a blur of taking care of Wyatt. Flynn still wasn’t sure how he’d gotten through that. But he had, and now it was all catching up with him.

Lucy had watched him murder a woman. Murder her not in cold blood, with the fire of rage, sure, but still—it was calculated. It was calm. He had chosen to murder.

How could she possibly want him after seeing that?

He tried not to look at her too much as they drove back to the catacombs. They had to get rid of the bodies—the bodies he’d killed. Wyatt had been aiming for limbs, going after nonlethal hits, to incapacitate.

After Wyatt had been hit and Emma went down, the other Rittenhouse members had kind of… well, lost their shit.

Flynn didn’t regret taking them down. He did regret Lucy having to see it.

Oh, and Rufus. The guy had gotten a shot off at one point and had looked pretty shaken up about it.

He parked the car. “We’ll strip the clothes, burn them, keep any identifying information. The bodies can go in the catacombs, no one will find them there.” Who was going to look for a body where there was already another body?

Lucy nodded, lips pressed tightly together.

They worked in silence except for Flynn’s directions. He wondered if Lucy could tell this wasn’t his first time doing something like this. She didn’t argue, but she didn’t say anything reassuring, either. In fact she didn’t really speak at all except to ask direct questions.

Fuck. He’d fucked it all up—although he didn’t regret it, not if it had saved Wyatt and Lucy’s lives. And Rufus’s, the poor guy was practically an innocent bystander in all of this. But there was no way Lucy was going to want to stay with him after this. She was probably working up the courage, finding the right words, to tell him right now. Then she’d take Wyatt with her and he’d be alone again and it would be nobody’s fault except his own…

“Garcia?”

Lucy’s voice was small. Shaken.

He looked up from where he’d been going through the dead Rittenhouse agents’ wallets. “Yes?”

She sat down next to him. “I know it’s wrong,” she said, very quietly, “but I don’t… I’m glad, that you killed them.”

Flynn felt his breath leave him in a rush. That was about the last thing he’d expected to hear from her. “What?”

“I know I should be regretful and I am, but I’m also… not. They were awful and greedy and trying to kill us, and I’m—I’m glad that they’re gone.”

She buried her face in her hands.

Flynn knew how she felt. It had been how he’d felt in his first campaign. He’d never in his life thought that Lucy of all people would know what that felt like. He’d have cut off his arm if it meant he could take it away from her. “C’mere.”

He pulled her into his arms, where she sagged against his chest. “I’m a horrible person,” she whispered. “But I’m so glad they’re dead, I’m so glad.”

“You’re not horrible,” he replied, rubbing up and down her back soothingly. “You’re the best person I know.” He paused. Then decided to take the plunge. “If anyone here is horrible it’s me.”

Lucy pulled back so that she could look him in the eye. “What?”

He laughed quietly, bitterly. “You saw me, Lucy. I killed all of these people. Actually, I think Rufus killed one of them, but don’t tell him that. I shot them. Me. And I did it happily.”

“We were in danger,” Lucy replied.

“Doesn’t change what I did.”

Lucy thought for a moment, then said, “I never was under any illusions about you. I looked up your records, and Wyatt’s, the moment I knew I was going to be working with either of you. I know some of the things you did.

“And I don’t care. I’m not saying that it’s… romantic, knowing that you killed people for us. I mean it is, it’s kind of sweet, but it’s also kind of not. But I can accept that. It was us or them and it doesn’t make what you did—what I let you do, because I was there and I could have stopped you—it doesn’t make it right but it makes it necessary and sometimes that’s all you’ve got to choose from in life. What’s necessary. And I for one am glad that none of us died and I want to give us a chance. The three of us. I love you and if you’re not going to be a part of Wyatt’s self-loathing then I’m not going to be a part of yours.”

Her hands tightened in his shirt, the one Rufus had thoughtfully picked up for him with the other supplies. “I’m not letting you go a second time.”

“What? No, Lucy, I’m the one who walked away—”

“And I’m the one who let you. And I’m not going to be that stupid again.”

He knew he should probably walk away. He wasn’t a good man, and she deserved so much better. But he had always been powerless when it came to her. And if she told him to stay, then he would stay.

“…all right.”

For the first time since they’d run into Emma again, Lucy smiled.

 

* * *

 

Wyatt was starting to feel a little less like death warmed over and more like almost-but-not-quite death when they heard the car rumble up.

Rufus jolted awake from where he’d been dozing off to the side. “That’ll be them. You good?”

Wyatt nodded. “Just some water.” The pain was definitely there, but manageable. He wasn’t about to start a painkiller addiction, not on his fifth goddamn bullet wound.

That had been the worst he’d ever gotten, though. He’d been convinced at one point that he was dying. He was also pretty sure he’d hallucinated.

Rufus passed him the water and Wyatt drank greedily. Rufus had propped him up against the cave wall a bit ago so that he was at least in a sitting position. It helped him feel less helpless.

There was the murmur of two quiet voices, and then they appeared in the cave entrance: Lucy and Flynn.

Flynn took one look at him and walked—no, strode over, the man had a goddamn purpose—to him, then knelt down.

Before Wyatt could even finish telling his mouth to say ‘hi’, Flynn was kissing the living daylights out of him.

“Okay,” Rufus said from somewhere. “I’m just gonna go step outside now.”

The sense memory hit him like a freight train. This was the first time they’d kissed since the kitchen, since Flynn had hauled him up and growled that he was going to damn well knock the homophobia out of him one way or another before making Wyatt forget his own goddamn name.

Wyatt kissed back as best he could, half-wondering if sneak attack kisses from Lucy and Flynn were all he was going to get for the rest of his life, before Flynn pulled back.

“Are you going to regret this in the morning?” Flynn asked.

The pain was clear in his eyes, as was the question. Wyatt couldn’t remember much from when he’d been shot until he’d woken up with Lucy, but he had a hazy recollection of Flynn’s bloody hands at his chest, and Flynn yelling at Rufus to hurry the fuck up.

Wyatt shook his head. “No.”

Flynn’s kiss was gentler this time. The movement pulled at Wyatt’s stitches though, and he remembered that oh yeah, he kind of hurt everywhere. He made a noise of pain before he could stop himself.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “It hurts.”

Flynn looked down at Wyatt’s bandage, probably checking to make sure it held. “Where?”

Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Everywhere.”

Flynn gave him a sly look. “Dammit, where doesn’t it hurt?”

Wyatt felt a grin slide over his face.

Lucy walked over, sitting on Wyatt’s other side. “You sure you’re feeling okay?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

Lucy shook her head. “We’re not doing that anymore.”

“What are we doing?”

Lucy brushed his sweat-damp hair out of his face before cupping his cheek, her thumb swiping back and forth across the skin. “We’re being together.”

For the first time in two years, Wyatt felt something inside of him settle, finally at peace.

 

 

* * *

 

Rufus rolled his eyes, even though he knew Jiya couldn’t see him. “It’s just those three being idiots again. I think they keep forgetting I’m even here.”

“Well that’s ridiculous, they’d’ve died like, three times over if you weren’t with them.”

Rufus could feel himself blushing and was glad that Jiya couldn’t see the ridiculous grin on his face. “So, Jiya, where exactly are you located?”

“Right now? Um, New York.”

Rufus tried not to let his heart plummet. He was a pilot, right? He could make New York work. Even if it was on the other side of the gigantic continent-spanning country.

“…but I was thinking of moving to Stanford. Lucy keeps needing me and was talking about finding a way to make me her official personal assistant.”

Rufus grinned. “That—that’s really good.”

“Yeah. Of course, I could be persuaded even more.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. There’s this one guy, he’s getting his degree, flies a plane? Don’t know if you’ve heard of him but for some insane reason he thinks Star Wars is better than Star Trek.”

Rufus was pretty sure his lungs stopped working.

“And what’s even more insane is that I like him anyway. Any chance you think he’ll ask me out? Give me another reason to join in these crazy escapades?”

Rufus was so very glad that the other three were in the cave, doing—actually he didn’t want to think about what they were doing. He took a deep breath.

“I think he’ll definitely ask you out. I think he’ll ask you if you want to go to this really cool Korean-Mexican fusion place that’s right next to a comic book store.”

He couldn’t be certain, since he couldn’t see her, but he was pretty sure that Jiya was smiling too. “Sounds like a date.”

Rufus fist pumped the air.


	11. Chapter 11

Lucy paced up and down the cave. “We can’t just keep going after it in bits and pieces. What if there are other aspects of Rittenhouse still out there? What if Emma’s team wasn’t the only one? What if she wasn’t the leader of the whole operation but was sent by her superiors?

"What are we going to do with the treasure we found? What about Wyatt? We can't keep him here forever. And I've got, fuck, I've got finals to deal with! I'm going to have tests to grade." Denise was going to kill her. She was going to be killed, dead, by Denise and the thing was the rest of the faculty were going to help cover it up because they were all scared of Denise as well and Lucy couldn't blame them.

Oh God, and what about Amy? She was probably worried sick. And Jess. Dammit. And what if Rittenhouse had gone after Mason too, just for funding them?

"There's no way we'll be able to finish finding all of this before I have to go back to Stanford," she told them. "There's no way. But I'm not leaving you guys, no, Flynn, don't even suggest it."

“I think you’re wearing a hole in the ground,” Wyatt slurred, high on painkillers.

“You have no idea how tempted I am to take a video right now,” Flynn told him.

“I already took one,” Rufus whispered.

Flynn looked like Christmas had just come early.

“Could we please focus?” Lucy asked. “We have to figure out how we’re going to actually access the rest of the treasure. Wyatt’s down for the count and we’re out of resources and the local police don’t exactly like us.”

“We just gave them a bunch of treasure,” Rufus protested.

“We also just led them in a car chase through the city,” Flynn reminded him.

“I blocked that from my mind,” Rufus replied. “It’s too traumatic.”

Flynn pointed at him. “I like him. Can we keep him?”

“I’m considering not keeping either of you if you don’t start thinking of something helpful,” Lucy snapped.

She could see that Flynn realized that she was seriously upset, because immediately his shoulders slumped and curled inwards the way that they did when he was trying to comfort her and get down to her level. He stood up, walking over to her and putting his hands gently on her shoulders, hunching over, knees bent, so that they were almost the same height.

“Well, this isn’t exactly a pirate treasure map,” he told her. “Or the Freemason treasure.”

The corners of Lucy’s mouth twitched upwards in spite of herself. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that to get to Step B, you don’t have to take Step A first,” Flynn said. “All of the treasures are listed right there in the scroll.

“Now, we’ve been doing it so that we go from one place to another. But theoretically, we don’t have to do that. We can hit all of those places at once, so long as we sit down and figure out where all of those places are.”

“We don’t have that kind of manpower,” Lucy said. That would be like mounting a dozen expeditions at once. One university, no matter how rich in funds, could manage that. And even if Mason was inclined to fund something like that God knew how much trouble it would be to organize and manage the entire thing…

“Or,” Flynn said, “We don’t have to do it at all.”

Lucy looked at him, and saw the gleam in his eyes—the one that said he had an idea.

Lucy felt a slower, more sly smile spreading across her face.

“Go on.”

 

* * *

 

About an hour later the director of the history department at Tel Aviv University received an email.

As did the director of the history department at Bar-Ilan University.

And the one at Yad Ben Zvi.

And the one at Ben-Gurion.

And the respective experts in ancient Middle Eastern studies at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and various other institutions.

The email that each received was identical.

 

_Dear Bored and Underpaid Academic,_

_Hey there. How’s the coffee?_

_Oh, by the way, the Copper Scroll treasure is real. Attached you’ll find various scanned documents attesting to that. Also some pictures. Isn’t gold shiny?_

_Name’s Jiya, by the way._

_There’s also a contract attached here. I’ll need you to sign it and send it back with this email. It’s pretty basic, but it’s drawn up by a billionaire who creates and eats contracts for breakfast so you can bet it’s ironclad._

_Basically you just agree that you’ll agree to make these finds public when you discover them. If you don’t, I’ll release the locations to the public, along with a little reminder of just how much this treasure is all worth. I’m sure your country’s going to be happy with the hundreds of treasure hunters it’ll have to deal with after that._

_Send the signed and very much legally binding contract, and I’ll send you the encryption key to unlock all the informational documents. And before you even try, good luck hacking that. Snowden has nothing on me._

_Have a lovely day!_

There was much debate within the various departments and individuals over these emails. But eventually, it was decided—after Connor Mason was contacted and he said that yes he made those contracts and were you idiots really standing around debating about this—that they would sign and agree.

The email they got back had the encryption key… and a list of all other academics who had been contacted.

Attached was the note:

 

_Play nice!_

_Lucy Preston, Garcia Flynn, and Wyatt Logan_

_(And their lovely pilot who wishes to remain anonymous lest everyone think he is just as insane as the three idiots he’s chauffeuring)_

* * *

 

They did eventually have to get Wyatt to a hospital.

Flynn didn’t really sleep for the next few days. Even after the doctors declared Wyatt to be well on the road to recovery and asked at what hospital he’d originally gotten his surgery at.

Lucy dozed on the chair next to Wyatt’s bed. Flynn almost envied her, but he kept expecting Rittenhouse or the Israeli government to come barging through the door. Call it paranoia from years on the run but he just couldn’t get rid of the itch deep down inside of his muscles, the one that compelled him to quietly pace outside in the hallway when he couldn’t sit still any longer.

They did end up sorting things out with the government, but as they’d suspected, Emma and her little team weren’t all of Rittenhouse. They had to be on the alert and they had to be prepared to expose and destroy them.

Maybe the Templars had once been good people. And maybe they didn’t deserve what had happened to them in medieval times, what the Church had done. But that didn’t excuse what they were doing now.

If only to protect the people he loved, Flynn was going to make sure that they were eradicated.

Jiya had put a virus into the documents she’d sent the academics. She now had access to all of their emails and their phone records. If any one of them was Rittenhouse and contacted another member of the organization about the treasure, Jiya would be alerted and could tell the three of them.

Lucy seemed excited to take them on, something Flynn felt that he should have expected. She might deny it but she still had the traveling bug, the longing for adventure inside of her. Wyatt seemed happy to just go along with whatever the other two wanted. Although that could have been the morphine talking.

Jess had been less than pleased when they’d finally called her.

“You got _shot_!?” she’d yelled into the phone, so loudly that Wyatt had to hold it away from his ear.

Lucy had winced. “It wasn’t exactly his fault, Jess, he was just protecting me.”

“You were supposed to be the sensible one!” Jess had yelled. “For crying out loud!”

“I told them I loved them?” Wyatt had added sheepishly, probably in the hopes it would end the lecture.

“And all it took was a gunshot wound, Wyatt Cameron Logan, you aren’t wiggling out of this one.”

The doctors now said he could be out by the next morning. Mason had already arranged for a hotel for them, where Rufus was staying in luxury and, apparently, hadn’t left the jacuzzi all day.

Flynn draped his jacket over Lucy, who was curled up in the chair again, and took away her phone, turning it off. She’d been texting Amy status reports when she’d drifted off.

God, he ached for a real bed. Ached to finally sleep with the warmth of someone else—two of them—in there with him instead of feeling cold and alone. He couldn’t wait until he could just enjoy finally being with Lucy and Wyatt instead of constantly worrying about someone bursting in to hurt them.

Wyatt stirred, quietly. “Garcia?”

He sat down at the edge of the bed, taking Wyatt’s hand. “Hey, I’m here.”

Wyatt nodded, as if to himself. “Good.”

“You okay? You need anything?”

Wyatt shook his head. “Just… you’re gonna stay this time, right?”

Flynn squeezed his hand. “Yes. As long as you two want me.”

Wyatt’s eyes narrowed into disbelieving slits. “Always.”

Flynn had to swallow down the lump in his throat. He’d only had one permanent family in his life. His mother he’d lost too early and his father… didn’t bear thinking about. All he’d had was Lorena, and then Iris, and then he’d lost them both. Even with Lucy and Wyatt, as much as he’d come to love them, he’d always felt in the back of his mind that it was temporary. That there would come a time when they didn’t want him anymore.

The idea of ‘always’, of ‘forever’, of permanence… he wasn’t sure he even knew what that felt like anymore.

But God, did he want it.

“You know you can sleep right?” Wyatt mumbled. “Rittenhouse isn’t gonna come bursting through the door.”

“That’s what you think,” Flynn replied. They still didn’t know all of what this group was capable of.

Wyatt just chuckled tiredly, his eyes sliding closed. “You gonna be here when I wake up this time?”

Flynn nodded, even though Wyatt couldn’t see him. “Always.”

 

* * *

 

Wyatt didn’t want to downplay how bad it sucked to get shot, because it really, really did suck. It hurt like anything.

But honestly, recovering from the shot was almost as bad.

He wanted to move. He wanted to do things. He hated just lying around. Especially once Lucy and Flynn got him back to the hotel and started weaning him off the painkillers so he had nothing but boredom, television, and this dull ache in his chest to get him through the day.

Lucy kept herself plenty busy. She was still consulting and she had sort of dropped everything three weeks before finals to come and save their asses so, there was a lot to be done.

Thank God that Denise Christopher—Lucy’s boss, and a terrifying woman if Wyatt was remembering correctly—was willing to let Lucy literally Skype in to lecture her students.

Flynn seemed to be feeling the same itch that Wyatt was. He helped the academic teams get to the treasure that he, Lucy, Rufus and Wyatt had already found and stashed, but after that there wasn’t much for him to do.

Wyatt did get a kick out of teasing him for not getting any of the treasure, though. The grumpy look that Flynn gave him was priceless.

Rufus, at least, seemed to be enjoying the peace and quiet. Wyatt wanted to point out that lounging around by choice was a whole lot more fun than lounging around in bed because you had no other choice. Rufus could go out to bars, swim in the pool, and visit the museums with Lucy (messaging Jiya like mad the entire time and sending her tons of selfies, his grin wide and goofy). Wyatt was stuck watching reruns of sitcoms in Hebrew.

At least it was a language that he could understand, anyway.

“When I get out of this,” he would tell anyone who would listen, “I’m going to run a marathon. Or take up martial arts. Or something.”

“I have a few other ideas for physical things you could do,” Lucy said idly. She was talking in a group chat with the people of the Paititi expedition. “Hey, do you two want to join this expedition?”

Flynn had been idly engaging gravity in a game of chicken as he balanced the chair he was sitting in on its back two legs, but on hearing that he lurched forward, letting the chair legs thump onto the carpet as he stood up and hurried over to the bed.

Wyatt felt a rush of gratitude as Lucy also moved to the bed, each one of them sitting on either side of him so that they could all look at the computer screen together.

Lucy explained quickly, her voice taking on that old note of excitement, the one that Wyatt remembered so well. She’d bring them ideas for their next trip, and now… now she was doing the same.

This was really happening, he thought. They were a team again, they were together again.

“It’s this city—some say part of what contributed to the legend of El Dorado—that is mentioned in Incan traditions. It’s supposedly to the east of Cusco, in the Andes, and is where the Incas took their treasure. It was the last stronghold.

“And while, yes, most rumors of huge treasure cities are false, this is pretty much recognized as having existed. Most of the Incan treasure was never found…”

“Although what the conquistadors did find was pretty insane in and of itself,” Flynn added.

Lucy shot him a quicksilver smile before focusing on the computer screen again. “There’s been a lot of expeditions that have gone missing or died. The area Paititi is supposed to be in is heavily forested and difficult terrain, with a lot of logging and drug running.

“The kicker? Supposedly the Vatican has known where the city is located for centuries, ever since they got a super detailed report from a missionary about the city in the 1600s.”

“Sounds like a possible Rittenhouse target, then,” Wyatt pointed out.

“My thoughts exactly,” Flynn growled.

“This expedition’s been trying to get me to join them all year,” Lucy said. “And, well… I just wasn’t interested before. I couldn’t see myself going out into the field again. Not without you two. But now…”

Wyatt grinned, feeling lighter than air. “I’m up for it.”

“Do you even have to ask?” Flynn said.

Lucy smiled at the two of them. “Then I guess I’ll let them know to expect us this summer.”

Wyatt almost fist pumped before he remembered it would tug at his stitches. Flynn caught the aborted movement and laughed. Lucy kissed his cheek.

“Jess is going to have our hides for this one,” Wyatt noted. But he was still smiling as he said it.

Everything was finally becoming the way that it should be.

 

* * *

 

“Home,” Wyatt moaned, collapsing onto the couch. “Thank God.”

Lucy was yelling at someone on the phone. Flynn suspected it was some department head or customs officer or something. Finally, Lucy gave up and handed him the phone. “Please yell at them in Spanish for me.”

“Uh…”

Lucy was already moving through the house, yelling, “Amy! We’re home!”

“Like she couldn’t tell already,” Wyatt grumbled, hugging the couch pillow and looking like he wasn’t inclined to move for the next twelve hours.

Flynn tried to simultaneously deal with this person on the phone (ah, apparently the local government agent who was acting as a liaison with the Paititi expedition) and get Wyatt off the couch. “No sleeping for another six hours or you’ll fuck up your sleep schedule.”

“What’s in it for me if I stay awake?” Wyatt replied, cheeky.

Flynn should have figured that Wyatt would become a teasing little shit once they all got together.

Amy came thundering down the stairs. Her face broke into a massive grin when she saw them. “Heeeeeey, Garcia! Wyatt!”

Flynn waved at her while trying to explain that no, sorry, his girlfriend didn’t really mean it when she said she’d break his nose, ha ha, she’s just… got an odd sense of humor that way…

Lucy looked over at Flynn, arms folded. “I regret nothing.”

Wyatt waved at Amy from the couch. “Did this couch get more comfortable since I was last here?”

“No, you’re just jet lagged,” Lucy said, hauling him up and shoving him towards the stairs. “Go shower, it'll wake you up. Ames, you might want to get out of the house for a few hours.”

Amy turned to watch Wyatt head up to the shower, then glanced over at Flynn—who was now trying to explain how Lucy just wanted to get in touch with the expedition, how hard could that possibly be, what do you _mean_ they disappeared—then looked over at her sister and smirked. “I take it things went well on your trip?”

“They could have definitely gone worse, let’s put it that way.” Lucy looked over at Flynn. “And?”

“The expedition’s disappeared but he didn’t want to tell you because he doesn’t want it getting out, he could get in trouble with his boss,” Flynn explained.

“The expedition will still be missing after a few hours of sex,” Amy said sagely.

Lucy leveled a glare at her sister that would’ve had Flynn diving for cover, but that Amy just took in stride. She grinned, grabbed her purse, and began backing out the front door. “Well, I guess I’m off to the movies, then! Have fun, stay safe, don’t break any furniture, don’t scar the neighbors, stretch beforehand, stay hydrated, extra lube’s in the bathroom cabinet…”

Lucy literally shoved her sister out the door and then closed it—loudly—in her face.

Flynn could hear Amy cackling through the door. “How about I tell this guy we’ll call him again tomorrow to get a progress report?”

“Have him email us an official report of everything he knows,” Lucy replied. “And tell him we’re flying in once the semester’s over.”

“Christmas in the rainforest,” Wyatt said, coming down the stairs still toweling his hair dry. “Just what all the songs are about.”

“You think _John Denver and the Muppets_ is an acceptable Christmas album, Wyatt, you do not get to make jokes.”

“How is that not an acceptable Christmas album? At least I’m not listening to Bing Crosby, he was racist as fuck.”

“At least his voice is bearable to listen to.”

Flynn finally hung up the phone. “He said he’ll email you, I gave him your address.”

He set down the phone, and then it was just the three of them, standing there.

Wyatt was wearing sweatpants and had a towel now just draped around his shoulders. Lucy was standing halfway in between the kitchen and the living room, their duffel bags still at her feet.

They were all alone in the house. The last time they’d been like this… everything had fallen apart.

Flynn didn’t trust himself to make the first move. Instead, he looked at Lucy, and saw Wyatt doing the same. She’d always been their leader. The reason they’d all met.

Lucy looked at Wyatt. Then looked at Flynn.

Then she walked over to the stairs and started up them.

Halfway up she paused and looked over her shoulder.

“What? You two coming or what?”

Flynn grinned, scrambling, as always, to obey.

 

* * *

 

Lucy held her breath as she said it, waiting. Watching.

Then Flynn almost tripped over his own feet hurrying around the couch to join her, and Wyatt—who was already at the base of the stairs—reached out to grab her hand.

Lucy knew how big of a deal this was for him. For all of them. She squeezed his hand, reassuring him. They knew what they were doing this time. There was no alcohol, no anger, no misunderstandings or secrets getting in the way. None of them had other attachments holding them back.

It was just the three of them.

She led them up to the master bedroom. It had become hers, after Mom had died, her old bedroom converting into an office. She figured the three of them would make good use of that room now that they were going on expeditions again.

Lucy planned on them also making good use of the bedroom.

“Oh, wow,” Flynn said, stopping in the doorway.

Lucy smiled. She’d forgotten that neither of the men had seen the master bedroom since she’d redecorated. It wasn’t out of any disrespect to Mom. They’d had their frustrations but they’d loved each other. It was just that she didn’t want to feel like she was sleeping in her mom’s room, or that she was making it into a shrine. She’d wanted to claim it as her own, and move forward.

She’d suspected that was what her mother would’ve wanted.

“You like it?” she asked. They could redecorate it again if they wanted, she supposed, although when they’d have the time to do that…

“I think it’s great,” Wyatt said, looking around.

“Yes, because we’re all in the bedroom for the décor,” Flynn observed.

He walked over to her slowly, as if thinking that even after all this time she might spook. His hands reached up and took her face, gently tilting it up and kissing her incredibly softly, in that way of his that always surprised her.

She blindly reached out for Wyatt’s hand, pulling him in when she found it. As Flynn pulled back, she drew Wyatt in, kissing him while her lips were still tingling with the warmth from Flynn’s mouth. Wyatt went a little boneless, as if with relief, and she wondered if this whole time each of them had been waiting for the other two to back out and change their minds.

There was a soft tug on her hair and she pulled back, letting Flynn gently move her out of the way to kiss Wyatt. Lucy contented herself with kissing along the line of Wyatt’s bare shoulder, her hands finally taking their chance to explore the body she’d only gotten to gaze at.

Wyatt made a small noise in the back of his throat and grabbed at Flynn’s clothes, tugging at them as though that would be enough to get them off.

Lucy moved over to help, and between the two of them they were able to rid Flynn of his pants and sweater. Lucy was happy to reacquaint herself with his body, finding the new scars that hadn’t been there before, reminding herself of the places that made Flynn flush red or groan quietly.

Wyatt was a bit more hesitant at first. Like a part of him still didn’t believe that he was allowed to do this. But Flynn reached out, trailing his fingers from Wyatt’s hip up his chest, pausing at the still-fresh bullet scar and pressing his palm to it.

Lucy paused, wrapping her arms around Flynn’s torso and resting her head against his shoulder, watching.

Flynn leaned in, pressing slow, sucking kisses down the side of Wyatt’s neck, and Lucy could literally see Wyatt relaxing into it. His hand came up to cover Flynn’s, and he slowly, cautiously almost, guided Flynn’s hand back down his chest until it was at the waistband of his sweatpants.

Flynn pulled down the sweatpants without even pulling away, and Lucy moved back so that Flynn could press right up against Wyatt, sliding their skin together until Wyatt was wrapping his arms around Flynn’s shoulders and making a helpless noise.

Lucy pressed up behind Wyatt, sliding her tongue up his spine, then biting down right where his shoulder and neck met. Flynn gave a rumble of approval and then kissed her over Wyatt’s shoulder, using his height to his advantage (although she still had to get up on her tiptoes).

“You’re overdressed,” Flynn noted, eyeing her.

Wyatt turned and looked over his shoulder. “I mean, it’s kind of hot,” he admitted.

Lucy could easily imagine another time, both men naked while she was still fully clothed, or vice versa, playing with the dynamics of that—but not this time. This time she just wanted to feel the both of them all over and get them all over her.

She stepped back, going to pull her shirt off, but Flynn and Wyatt looked at one another in one of their moments of silent, instant communication, and then her hands were being gently moved aside so that they could get her clothes off for her.

Wyatt kissed her, deep and slow, while she felt Flynn getting to his knees—and then felt him kissing along her stomach as he peeled her jeans slowly down off her body, his mouth following, kissing the skin they exposed until he was sucking lightly at her inner thighs and Lucy had to hold onto Wyatt to stay upright.

Flynn slowly pushed her legs open and Lucy gasped into Wyatt’s mouth, her nails digging into his shoulders as Flynn started to lick his way up her thighs, then gently sucked at her clit through her underwear.

Lucy could feel her legs shaking. It was, all right, she could admit it, about two years since the last time she’d had sex.

Okay so the last time she’d had sex had been with Flynn two days before the _Time_ interview.

She’d never had a problem with casual sex, it was just that, after everything… her heart just wasn’t in it anymore. Going out to a bar and finding someone and chatting them up and hopefully liking them enough to want to take them back to her place—or maybe not liking them and then having to start all over—and then what if Amy was home, did she go back to their place instead… it was all just too much work.

And if she’d been honest with herself, she wasn’t in a place emotionally to go around having casual sex. She hadn’t been over her boys.

What all of this sappy retrospection that her brain was bringing up meant was that she wasn’t going to really be able to hold on long. Not when Wyatt was kissing her and had his hands sliding all over her skin, her breasts, digging into her back, keeping her upright. Not when Flynn was sliding her underwear down slow and methodical, his nails lightly scraping against her skin and making her shiver.

“C’mere,” Wyatt whispered into her mouth, turning her so that she was now leaning back against his chest and Flynn could spread her legs wider, his tongue finally, finally started licking into her folds.

Lucy shuddered and keened, her head falling back onto Wyatt’s shoulder. Wyatt’s hands were all over, while Flynn’s gripped her hips hard to keep her still. She could feel Wyatt’s cock, hard and thick, sliding up against the small of her back and she wondered if she just bent forward a little, could he be inside of her while Flynn kept…

It wasn’t really possible, not unless they stopped everything and changed positions a bit, but the thought of it made her moan. She turned her head and gently scraped her teeth over Wyatt’s pulse point, sucking on a small mouthful of skin before pulling back and soothing it with a few kitten licks.

God, it was like Flynn didn’t even need to breathe. She knew he had to be, but somehow, he was managing it like a ninja because she couldn’t feel the slick pressure let up even once. It was unrelenting and teasing and perfect. His tongue wriggled into her and she cried out, grabbing his hair instinctively. Fuck, she wanted more, she wanted him or Wyatt or taking turns or both, she didn’t care, she just wanted _more_.

Wyatt lightly pinched one of her nipples, tugging on her earlobe with his teeth, just as Flynn sucked hard on her clit.

She shuddered, her hips jolting, and God she’d forgotten how good it felt, just how much she’d missed it, how—

And then Flynn wasn’t even waiting for her to finish. He was sliding a finger inside of her, then two, prolonging the orgasm, still licking at her while his fingers moved in and out of her and she was done, gone, out, down for the count oh _fuck_ —

Lucy slowly blinked the stars out of her eyes, and realized that she’d been tugging on Flynn’s hair with all her might with one hand, and had definitely scratched up Wyatt’s arm that had slid around her waist.

Flynn didn’t seem to mind about the hair, if the besotted look he was giving her was any indication. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and stood up, kissing her slowly, tenderly, and then Wyatt, who Lucy could still feel nudging insistently against her back.

She slid out from between them and then grabbed one of their hands each, tugging them towards the massive king-sized bed that she’d splurged on six months ago. Amy, the little shit, had left a box of condoms and lube on the bed. Lucy shoved them aside. She ended up crawling backwards up the bed, Wyatt between her legs, kissing her all over, while Flynn slid up behind Wyatt and reached around him to start slowly tugging at his cock.

Wyatt made a strangled noise and Lucy arched up, spreading herself out, putting on a bit of a show for him. Flynn might not have ever been with Wyatt before but Lucy had always suspected that he’d been with a man at some point in his past, and this definitely confirmed it—Flynn was far too comfortable and good at doing this for it to be his first time.

Not that she was judging. And she definitely appreciated getting to watch all of that experience at work.

She kissed along Wyatt’s chest, pressing the flat of her tongue against one of his nipples before scraping her teeth over it and then tugging, ever so gently. Wyatt jerked like he’d been shot—which was not a fun metaphor—and groaned.

Lucy smirked against his skin before lapping up a bead of sweat that had been working its way down his chest. So, Wyatt was a nipple guy. Good to know.

She felt a broad hand at her shoulder and pushed herself up so that Flynn could kiss her again. “Take over?” he murmured, kissing the corner of her mouth.

Lucy nodded, and then pulled back, replacing Flynn’s hand on Wyatt’s cock with hers. Her angle was different but she could definitely manage, and Wyatt wasn’t complaining if the way his mouth dropped open was any indication.

She quickly saw why Flynn had asked her to take over—he reached over to the side and grabbed the lube, then slicked up a finger. Just the one, which made sense, no reason to push Wyatt too fast, too soon.

“Hey,” Flynn said, dropping a kiss onto Wyatt’s shoulder as he slid his hand down to palm Wyatt’s ass. “You okay if I—”

Wyatt nodded, turning and brushing his mouth against Flynn’s. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yes, definitely, please.”

“You didn’t even let me finish,” Flynn grumbled, but Lucy could hear the fond note in his voice.

She adjusted her grip so it wasn’t as tight, keeping the pace slow and teasing as Flynn gently rubbed his finger against Wyatt’s entrance, repeating it until Wyatt was actively pushing back against him. She knew the moment that Flynn slid his finger inside because Wyatt’s hips jerked violently and she had to start kissing him to calm him down.

It had to be a bit of sensory overload for him, but Lucy was loving the sounds that were coming out of his mouth, flowing into hers as she kissing him over and over again, hungry, devouring him.

Wyatt suddenly stiffened, crying out and biting down hard on her lower lip. Lucy pulled away and looked over his shoulder at Flynn, who grinned devilishly and did it again.

“See what all the fuss is about?” Lucy purred, kissing just underneath Wyatt’s ear. He was panting, harsh and desperate, and she knew he was being pushed to his limit. She tightened her grip on him again, speeding up and adding a little twist of the wrist.

Wyatt groaned and came, spilling all over her stomach. Lucy hummed, pleased, and pecked him on the lips. “Very good.”

Wyatt’s eyes went dark at the praise, and she filed that little thought away for later. For now, she gently pushed Wyatt to the side so that Flynn could move between them and they could both kiss him. She felt a little clumsy in the afterglow and she was sure that Wyatt did too, but she manage to push Flynn onto his back and climb on top of him to straddle him.

Flynn looked dazed, his eyes darting all over her body like he wasn’t sure where to look first. Wyatt helpfully passed her a condom and she kissed him in thanks, lightly trailing her fingers over his stomach and chest.

She winked at Flynn and bent down, sucking on the head of his cock without so much as a by-your-leave. Flynn groaned, hips twitching. It had been way too long since she’d done this for her to suck him all the way down the way that she wanted to, but she could tease him a bit. She licked a long stripe up the underside of his shaft and Flynn groaned again, only for his groan to be muffled halfway through. She glanced up and saw Wyatt kissing Flynn like he’d die if he didn’t, like the only air in the room was in Flynn’s mouth.

Lucy felt the air get punched out of her lungs at the sight. She sucked a bruise into Flynn’s inner thigh, one eye on the men as Wyatt finally got to overwhelm Flynn instead of the other way around, Flynn’s hands coming up to spear into Wyatt’s hair and keep him there.

She sucked Flynn’s cock about halfway into her mouth, not willing to risk anything more at the moment, and then swirled her tongue around the head as she pulled away. “Wyatt,” she said, surprised at how rough her voice sounded. “Come here.”

Wyatt gave Flynn a final peck on the lips and then hurried to obey. Lucy sat up, directing Wyatt to sit behind her again. “Get me ready,” she ordered.

She wasn’t quite sure where this whole giving orders thing came from. It was just so instinctive after years of ordering them around on expeditions. But Wyatt seemed more than happy to have it translate into the bedroom. He pressed up against her back and slid his hand down between her legs, two fingers easily able to sink into the heat of her after her first orgasm from Flynn.

Lucy gasped, her head falling back. She could see that Flynn was watching Wyatt’s fingers moving in and out of her, his eyes dark and pinned to the spot.

God, Wyatt might have had relationship issues with Jess but sex probably hadn’t been one of them. He touched her like he already knew her body, his thumb circling her clit and rubbing it just enough to get her more worked up without giving her the release that she craved.

“Feel free to get rough,” Flynn said, his voice dark and his accent thick. “She likes that.”

Wyatt took that as his cue to bite Lucy’s shoulder. She couldn’t have stopped her scream if she’d tried, the pleasure spiking. Wyatt added a third finger and sped up, and she thought that she might lose her voice with the sounds starting to spill out of her.

She grabbed the condom again and rolled it onto Flynn. “I’m good,” she told Wyatt. “I’m—I’m good, Wyatt, I’m gonna—”

Thankfully he understood what she was trying to say and slid his fingers out of her, helping her line up so that she could sink down onto Flynn.

Flynn swore, his hands twisting in the sheets. Wyatt gave Lucy a final nip at her lips and squeezed her hips, and then moved away from her, focusing instead on Flynn as she started to move.

God, he felt good. Flynn wasn’t—well, he was 6’4” and his dick was proportional, so he was definitely filling her up. She was glad that Wyatt had used three fingers so that she was prepared. She had a feeling that she was always going to get this delicious burn, this slight edge of almost too much, and it made her whole body shiver with pleasure and anticipation.

She took her time adjusting, finding just the right angle. Luckily Flynn was being pleasantly distracted by Wyatt, who was jumping into this whole being-with-a-man thing with gusto—or maybe it was just a being-with-Flynn thing.

After all, who was going to pass up the chance to drive Garcia Flynn crazy?

Lucy took a deep breath and started moving, carefully at first, feeling her way. Then she shifted her hips and—oh. There. Right—right fucking there. Yes.

She sped up, rolling her hips, and was rewarded by Flynn groaning and starting to move with her. God, she loved this. She loved how connected they all were.

Wyatt pulled away from Flynn to slide his tongue into her mouth, to gently pull her hair back from her face, to kiss her breasts, and then he was back at Flynn again. She let her head tip back and just rode it, pushing herself up and down to meet Flynn’s thrusts, her mouth falling open and small noises just spilling out of her. She was hitting that high, that liquid friction feeling where everything narrowed down to just the point where he was moving inside of her.

Flynn’s thrusts started getting more erratic, and she felt Wyatt slide behind her again, his hand moving between her legs to rub at her clit. “Beautiful,” he murmured against her neck, kissing slowly along her skin.

Lucy couldn’t tell if he meant her or Flynn, and she loved that she couldn’t figure it out. She didn’t want to figure it out. She wanted the lines between all of them to finally blur.

She saw, out of the corner of her eye, Wyatt exchange a mischievous look with Flynn.

Then he bit down hard on her neck again.

She went off like a bottle rocket, jerking, Flynn still hard inside of her and making it all that much more intense. She almost fell over, but Wyatt wrapped an arm around her and kept her upright, letting Flynn thrust hard inside of her a couple more times before coming as well, a long, low groan spilling out of him.

They sat there, panting, Flynn still inside of her for the most part.

Fuck, that had been fantastic. They were doing that again as soon as possible.

Lucy looked down at her stained chest.

Okay, they were doing that again _after_ they all took a shower.

 

* * *

 

 

Wyatt had been a little scared about how things would change.

Not that sex was the only reason that things would change. They'd all talked about their feelings. They'd discussed this. They knew how they felt.

But there was something about the intensity of sex, the raw, physical intimacy of it, that made this all seem so much more real. Especially now that they were back at Lucy's house, living with her, instead of stuck in a kind of limbo in a hotel room or a hospital. Dramatic love declarations were one thing in a cave. They were a whole other thing when you were safely back at home.

To his pleasant surprise, however, not much changed at all.

That night, after they took a shower—having to take turns, which made Flynn comment to Lucy that she ought to renovate her bathroom to make it big enough for all three of them—they just got dinner like they always used to. They teased one another, and Flynn was a troll and Lucy was adorable and they would both gang up on him. The only differences were good ones: Flynn sliding a hand into Wyatt's back pocket and talking low in his ear, Lucy kissing him on the cheek as she stole a bite of food off his plate.

It wasn't awkward. It wasn't uncomfortable. It was like it always should have been like this.

There were still a lot of things to work out: how to get Jiya over to Stanford. The Paititi expedition which was now apparently missing. Rittenhouse. Balancing everything with Lucy's teaching job. Talking to Jess and telling her all that had gone down.

But that all felt extraneous. He could handle all of that. So long as the three of them were solid, Wyatt felt like he could take on anything.

They stumbled into bed kind of on top of each other. Lucy ended up in the middle, shoving her feet in between Wyatt's legs because she got cold, Flynn's bicep confiscated to be used as her pillow. Flynn just draped an arm over her middle and tangled his fingers up with Wyatt's before Wyatt's panic attack about not belonging could even start.

He wrapped himself around Lucy, his forehead resting against Flynn's jaw. It was like they were all puzzle pieces, fitting into each other, the way that they always had.

The way that they always would.

 

* * *

 

**Back in Action**

_The dream team is back—with a bang._

By Kate Drummond

August 17, 2019

 

The first time I knocked on Dr. Lucy Preston’s door, I was greeted with suspicion by Wyatt Logan, one of her teammates.

This time, the door opens before I can even knock, and I’m greeted by a bright-eyed young woman.

“You must be Kate!” She grins, shaking my hand. “I’ve heard great things about you. C’mon in, Lucy’s running around.”

‘Running around’ apparently means scrambling around the house trying to find where she put her printed-out syllabus for her students. School starts in two Mondays, but most freshmen will be on campus in just two days to do orientation. As one of the newly-tenured professors, Dr. Preston’s got a lot riding on her shoulders.

“Um, Lucy?” calls Flynn. He looks pretty much unchanged from when I last saw him two years ago, except a lot more relaxed. He holds up a stack of papers. “These were by the bathtub?”

“Oh my God.” Dr. Preston all but dives for the papers, rifling through them.

“Do we even want to know how they ended up there?” Wyatt Logan asks, striding into view.

The moment he sees me, he walks over and gives me a hug. “Good to see you again.”

I let him know that it’s likewise, and we chat for a few minutes while Dr. Preston organizes everything with the help of Flynn. I learn during this chat that Logan is now divorced from his wife, Jessica.

“You remind me of her, actually,” he tells me, and then assures me that it’s a compliment. “Jess and I are best friends and always will be. She’s over here all the time. We just realized that the romance had stopped being a part of the equation.”

The woman who opened the door for me reappears, this time with Amy Preston and another person that I don’t know. I’m officially introduced to both the new people and learn that these are the infamous Jiya Marri and Rufus Carlin.

Carlin, who is pursuing a PhD in Engineering, is the newest member of the team. Marri’s been helping Dr. Preston out for the past two years as a… well, I haven’t been told exactly what she is. Just that she’s good with computers.

I’ll let you all draw our own conclusions.

It quickly becomes clear that Marri and Carlin are more than just friends. They plop down together in the armchair, curled up like cats. Amy Preston greets me and then excuses herself—she’s late for her meeting. Amy is a social worker whose hobby is performing Shakespeare for prison inmates. Apparently, they make the best audiences.

Flynn, Logan, and Dr. Preston all curl up together on the couch. I notice that they’re much more physically intimate than they were last time. For instance, Flynn’s got his arms on the back of the couch so that they’re pretty much around Logan and Dr. Preston’s shoulders. But I don’t comment on it. Instead, I get down to brass tacks: the Copper Scroll and the Lost City of Paititi.

After vanishing as a team for two years, just after my previous article about them came out in _Time_ magazine, the trio are back with a vengeance, finding not just one but two legendary treasures and hacking through centuries of religious and political red tape.

“Okay,” I tell them. “How exactly does one take on Israel and the Catholic Church in one year?”

“We’re cycling our way through all the major religions,” Flynn quips. “Next is Hinduism.”

Logan elbows him, but he’s grinning. “We were lucky to have a good team with us. Jiya and Rufus, and the original expedition to Paititi that we joined.”

"We're also very determined," Dr. Preston adds. "We don't really take no for an answer. And when someone tells me I can't do something, it usually makes me want to do it even more."

I ask them why they went dark for two years, and why they’re back now.

“We had a lot of…” Dr. Preston pauses, searching for words. “Personal issues. My mom’s death, Wyatt’s marriage… we need to take some time off to deal with all of that.”

“And then Flynn landed himself in hot water,” Logan adds.

“And you jumped right in after me,” Flynn reminds him.

“And then they dragged me into it,” Dr. Preston finishes with a smile. “After that, well, we remembered why we’d loved working with each other.”

I ask them if they plan on going dark on me again after this. All three laugh.

“No way,” Dr. Preston assures me. “There’s still far too many mysteries to solve. And now we’ve got Carlin and Marri to help us out, things are smoother than ever.”

I ask the two new members what it’s like to work with these three.

“Miserable,” Carlin says, deadpan.

“I mean, if you can accept the fact that they read each other’s minds,” Marri says with a knowing smile, “then yeah, they’re okay.”

Logan flips them off while Dr. Preston blows them a kiss.

“Right now we’re on a bit of a break,” Flynn says. “Lucy’s got the semester starting in a few days.”

“And there’s a lot of fallout from the Copper Scroll and Paititi to deal with,” Logan adds. “We pissed off a lot of people.”

I ask if that has anything to do with the various arrests that were involved in their dealings with the Vatican, including prominent members of society such as Senator Nicholas Keynes.

“It might,” Dr. Preston says vaguely, giving me a conspiratorial smile.

“We’re not yet sure what the next adventure is,” Flynn admits.

“But I think we’ve more than earned some downtime,” Carlin pipes in with a groan.

“You big baby,” Marri teases, kissing him on the cheek.

There’s a real atmosphere of family here. That makes sense, seeing as the five spend a whole lot of time together. I even learn that the original trio now live together.

“It seemed neater,” Flynn says when I ask.

Carlin starts laughing uproariously at that and I have a feeling that I’m missing out on another inside joke.

“I’m actually thinking about finally tracking down those Faberge eggs,” Dr. Preston says. “It’s been a longstanding joke with us, but hey, they are actually missing.”

I ask if the absence from one another changed their dynamic in any way.

“We had to do a lot of talking at first,” Flynn acknowledges while Logan has a sudden coughing fit. “We had to catch each other up. Explain what we’d been up to, things like that.”

“We’re definitely on the same page now,” Dr. Preston adds.

I’m glad to hear it, since I want first scoop on the next treasure they find.

Logan grins at me. “I think we could arrange that.”

And you know, I really believe them. There’s a tight knit, relaxed atmosphere among the three that makes me realize the tension that was there the last time I interviewed them. Marri and Carlin seem to fit right in with the others, bantering easily and keeping up with the trio’s rapid-fire conversations.

As I’m leaving, I double-check if they aren’t sure what they’re going after next.

“No,” Dr. Preston tells me, but she smiles. “Whatever it is, though, it’s going to be good.” She looks back at Logan and Flynn, who are standing a few feet behind us—guard dogs until the end. “This is good.”

I'm rather inclined to agree with her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoo, sorry that last chapter took so long! I hope you all enjoyed it!


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